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(JTA) — Talking on the cellphone from an empty balcony within the Longacre Theater in New York, a number of hours earlier than a preview efficiency of his newest play, Tom Stoppard stated the present is “one that individuals like to speak to me about.”
“Leopoldstadt,” which formally hits Broadway on Sunday after an award-winning London debut in 2019, follows a number of generations of a Jewish household in Vienna from the flip of the Twentieth century by World Conflict II and formation of the state of Israel. Viewers members within the preview interval have usually lingered within the theater after the exhibits, and Stoppard — one of many world’s most revered playwrights of the previous half century — stated “it’s simply superb” what number of of them see components of their household historical past within the present.
So, maybe unsurprisingly, he requested on the cellphone: “What about your loved ones?”
The solutions he obtained: this reporter’s members of the family are inexact about their historical past, since nobody has ever carried out a DNA take a look at or compiled complete household tree; there are rumors of rabbis from Poland and ancestors from Iraq; there may be an uncle whose German-Jewish household displayed Christmas timber of their New York Metropolis condo for many years; and there are numerous kin across the globe who know little to nothing about one another’s existence.
These solutions contact on the array of themes which can be launched within the first minutes of “Leopoldstadt,” which can be the identify of Vienna’s storied Jewish quarter and the place the play is ready. The play is on its floor about a number of broad developments — the horrors of antisemitism and the Holocaust, the connection between socialism and “Nationwide Socialism,” the talk over Israel’s formation. However at its core is a reckoning with the complexity of Twentieth-century Jewish household histories: how persecution led many to crave assimilation, and hardened others to defend their heritage; how pogroms and wars cut up up household timber and scattered them throughout Europe, and past; how trauma affected their descendants’ recollections of household and of the moments that pulled them aside.
These are the heady questions that Stoppard, now 85, has been eager about for the previous couple of a long time, as he leaned into studying concerning the Jewish heritage that his household principally suppressed for the primary half of his life.
“I used to be writing traces which have been in the back of my head for a very long time now,” he stated.
Stoppard — whose physique of labor contains “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Lifeless,” “Travesties” and the screenplays “Empire within the Solar” and “Shakespeare in Love” — was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to 2 Jewish dad and mom. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, his household fled to Singapore, the place the shoe firm his father labored for had a manufacturing unit. However Japan would occupy Singapore, so Stoppard, his brother and mom left for India; his father, who tried to go away later, died on a ship bombed by the Japanese.
In India, his mom married a British soldier named Kenneth Stoppard, and Tomas Straussler turned Tom Stoppard. After Tom attended a Christian boarding faculty in Darjeeling for a couple of years, the Stoppards moved to England, the place he developed a deep English sensibility and love for all issues English, from the monarchy to the nation’s famously dry and absurd humorousness. The Strausslers’ Jewishness, just like the identify, turned a factor of the previous, as inspired by a hardheaded stepfather and a mom trying to let go of her traumas.
“I got here on effectively as an honorary Englishman. Ken taught me to fish, to like the countryside, to talk correctly, to respect the monarchy,” Stoppard wrote in a 1999 article in Discuss Journal titled “On Turning Out to Be Jewish.” “I used to be nonetheless Tommy Straussler, however English was my solely language when Ken gave me his identify three weeks later.”
It wasn’t till the Nineteen Nineties — a number of a long time right into a profession that had already yielded three Tony awards for greatest play — that Stoppard first confronted his Jewishness in a major means. The granddaughter of his mom’s sister contacted him in 1993, they usually met in London, the place she sketched out the Straussler household tree on paper for him.
“I do know we have been Jewish,” he stated, however requested, “How Jewish have been we?”
“You have been utterly Jewish,” his relative Sarka Gauglitz stated.
The play explores how Jews assimilated into Austrian tradition. (Joan Marcus)
Stoppard’s ignorance set off an intense guilt. The next 12 months, he visited a synagogue in Prague the place a few of his kin’ names are inscribed on the partitions, memorializing the truth that they have been a number of the 1000’s of Czech Jews killed in focus camps. His mom died in 1996, additional pushing him to analysis the historical past she had saved from him.
Stoppard’s subsequent works, as a standard narrative goes, steadily turned extra emotional and romantic, in distinction together with his earlier performs extra identified for his or her absurdity, humor, philosophy, historical past, social commentary and different mental matters. He has stated he now appreciates writing with “a love story in it.”
However his guilt wouldn’t bubble over onto the web page (Stoppard nonetheless doesn’t personal a pc and has an assistant sort up his handwritten work) till a number of years later. There are moments and characters in “Leopoldstadt” impressed by his household’s story, he defined, however it’s not a instantly autobiographical play. The setting of Vienna, as an illustration, displays his decades-long obsession with that metropolis’s historical past and its wealthy cultural milieu; the play makes frequent point out of Vienna’s famously influential and affluent Jewish class, of which a number of of the story’s members of the family are a component. The trajectory of Sigmund Freud, perhaps essentially the most well-known Viennese Jew of the time, can be adopted carefully, because the characters implicitly look to him for inspiration on whether or not to remain or depart because the Third Reich begins its rise.
There’s no less than one character who relies instantly on an actual particular person, although: Leo, a younger, urbane author, is supposed to be a stand-in for Stoppard himself and seems on the finish in a scene that’s clearly impressed by the playwright’s first encounter together with his Jewish household tree in 1993.
Because the play begins in 1899, the characters quarrel concerning the state of Jews and antisemitism in Austria, the deserves of assimilation and the burgeoning Zionism motion. A few of them, together with Herman — a rich textile businessman and the closest the play has to a protagonist, performed by “Numb3rs” star David Krumholtz — are married to non-Jews, a undeniable fact that provides texture to the debates. Within the first scene, the assembled household gathers at a dinner with a Christmas tree, to which they affix a big Star of David decoration.
Later, the play yields a hilarious scene involving a bris, a major achievement given the truth that Stoppard had no concept what the circumcision ritual or every other non secular Jewish customized concerned as he began his analysis. He ended up asking some associates, together with the Jewish essayist Fran Lebowitz, for assist with particulars alongside the way in which.
“He’s a genius — he can learn the analysis and reimagine it in dramatic kind,” the play’s director Patrick Marber, a revered playwright in his personal proper who can be Jewish, instructed the Jewish Telegraphic Company. “However he hasn’t lived it.”
The writing of “Leopoldstadt,” for Stoppard, who had beforehand written some three dozen performs, felt totally different.
“The beauty of theater is that you just don’t have to incorporate that a lot,” Stoppard stated, downplaying the in depth analysis he does earlier than every work. “To a big extent, the play has to commerce on the information that the viewers brings to the theater.
“However I discovered myself treading fairly delicately” [with “Leopoldstadt”], he stated, including that he felt a deep accountability to dig deeply into the problems raised.
The play’s household finally ends up extraordinarily fractured, and most die in Nazi camps. A heartrending twist on the finish will get on the excessive methods some Jews went to save lots of members of their households.
Stoppard stated he practically named the play “The Household Album,” a truth that’s poignant when thought-about within the context of a scene from the play’s starting involving a photograph album. It turns into extra related because the story unravels and the household’s branches are scattered about, and murdered.
“I’ve been writing in names which can be lacking, those I do know, which is certainly not all of them,” the household’s matriarch says within the opening act as she holds a photograph album. “That’s what occurs, you see. First, there’s no want to jot down who they’re, as a result of everybody is aware of that’s great-aunt Sophia or cousin Rudi, after which solely a few of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t bear in mind this man with the little canine,’ and also you don’t notice how briskly they’re disappearing from being remembered.”
For the followers Stoppard has talked to, “It’s as if they’ve by no means seen the topic handled earlier than like this” on stage, he stated, arguing that essentially the most poignant and outstanding Holocaust-themed works have usually been reserved for Hollywood.
Brandon Uranowitz, left, as Nathan, and Arty Froushan as Leo. The latter character is a stand-in for Stoppard. (Joan Marcus)
Marber — who’s greatest identified for writing “Nearer,” the play that impressed a movie of the identical identify starring Natalie Portman and Jude Legislation — grew up going to synagogue in London and has proudly declared himself over time to be a “Jew first, Englishman second.” However even he has been deeply moved by the expertise of engaged on “Leopoldstadt” (he directed the British model as effectively). He now recurrently wears a Jewish star necklace, for instance, which his non-Jewish spouse gave him throughout New York rehearsals.
Krumholtz, who descends from Hungarian and Polish Jews, has turn into extra in contact together with his Jewish identification all through the method, too, Marber added.
“That is the primary time I’ve understood the sensation of Jews feeling the bottom shifting beneath their ft, and never having the ability to imagine it will get that dangerous,” Marber stated.
As he ready to go away the balcony (“I’ve to see who else wants me”), Stoppard admitted, perhaps not purposefully, that he’s nonetheless studying concerning the ripple results of Jewish historical past. For example, he stated “it’s unbelievable” what number of household New York Metropolis households he has realized about from followers which have legacies that aren’t “so totally different from the household within the play.”
There’s one other dynamic that has shocked him, too, associated to all the buzz the play has generated.
“I assumed that the topic of the Jews by the battle had been carried out and carried out,” he stated. “However truly, probably not!”
“Leopoldstadt” is taking part in on the Longacre Theater in New York by January 2023.
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