4 | JULY 27 • 2023 

guest column
Leopoldstadt — What Does It Tell Us 
About What We Face Today?
L

eopoldstadt — Tom 
Stoppard’s play about his 
family’s Jewish heritage 
recently won four Tony Awards 
including one for “Best Play.
” 
First performed in London in 
2020, the play 
quickly closed 
due to COVID, 
but re-opened 
to rave reviews 
in New York last 
year. Its depiction 
of Jewish identity 
amid growing 
antisemitism 
seems particularly relevant 
today.
Leopoldstadt is the story 
of the fictional Merz fami-
ly —Viennese Jews who are 
educated, intermarried and 
successfully assimilated into 
upper middle class Austrian 
society. It is inspired by 
Stoppard’s own background; 
he was born Tomas Straussler 
in Czechoslovakia. His mother 
told Stoppard said that she 
didn’t really think about being 
Jewish until 1939. Stoppard’s 
father was a doctor employed 
by a large Czech shoe man-
ufacturer, and his supervisor 
arranged for the family to flee 
to Singapore just before the 
Nazis invaded.
Well into adulthood, 
Stoppard, 86, knew virtually 
nothing about his Jewish her-
itage due in part to his father’s 
early death in World War II 
and his mother’s subsequent 
marriage to a British army offi-
cer who wanted them to forget 
the past and become very 
British. Eventually, Stoppard 
learned that his four Jewish 

grandparents and several great-
aunts died in the Holocaust.
Leopoldstadt’s Merz fam-
ily underestimates the Nazi 
threat to all Jews, regardless of 
their religious practices and 
professional or civic accom-
plishments. The Nazis didn’t 
care whether Jews celebrat-
ed Christmas or Chanukah 
or both. Having one Jewish 
grandparent was enough to be 
a target.
On Kristallnacht, when a 
Christian friend arrives at the 
Merz home and urges them to 
leave immediately, each family 
member has a different reason 
for not doing so. One elderly 
man is caring for his terminally 
ill wife. One relative concedes 
that things are bad but bearable 
and unlikely to get worse. 
Another relative wants to 
remain in Vienna to ensure 
that his business, which he has 
already placed in the name of 
a Christian employee, is main-

tained for his son to inherit. A 
few others are unsure about 
where they could emigrate and 
how they could survive. Many 
European Jews wrestled with 
such grim choices. 

Their plight evokes the 
phrase “failure of imagina-
tion,
” which was cited in the 
9/11 report. Who could have 
foreseen the killing of millions 
of Jews during World War II? 
Who could have foreseen the 
murder of 11 Jews at the Tree 
of Life Synagogue in 2018?
Perhaps the play’s most 
poignant moment occurs 
when the Stoppard-like British 
character meets with sever-
al cousins who survived the 
Holocaust. Then he learns that 
many of his relatives, including 
both those who were Jewish 
and not so Jewish, had died 
in the Holocaust. Ironically, 
he realizes that despite being 
raised as British and non-Jew-
ish, he is the only surviving 

family member who is “100 
percent Jewish” with Jewish 
parents and grandparents, 
unlike his cousins. He is left 
with guilt and questions about 
his identity.
With antisemitism and rac-
ism on the rise in the U.S., it 
seems reasonable to be anxious. 
In 2004, Philip Roth wrote The 
Plot Against America — a novel 
in which Charles Lindbergh, an 
isolationist who praised Hitler, 
defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt 
in 1940. The novel depicts 
how life changed for a Jewish 
family as antisemitism and 
persecution of American Jews 
increases during Lindbergh’s 
presidency.
But it is important to focus 
on what is different today 
versus Europe and the U.S. 
in the 1930s and 1940s. As 
online, verbal and physical 
threats and vandalism against 
Jewish individuals, schools 
and synagogues have occurred 

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 5

Shari S. 
Cohen
Contributing 
Writer

The Broadway 
Company of 
Leopoldstat. 

