NPR: All four of Tom Stoppard's grandparents died in the Holocaust, but he only learned about his Jewish roots in middle age. His new play, Leopoldstadt, which opened Sunday on Broadway, is both an acknowledgement and personal excoriation, asking how for so long he could have ignored his family's history of suffering.
3 comments:
Leopoldstadt seems like such an incredible play from such an interesting perspective that we often do not get to hear about because many who abandon their Jewish heritage tend to not make attempts to revisit it later in life. It is a bit heartbreaking to hear how hard it seems Stoppard is being on himself through the play when it is hard to know these things when they are purposely being kept from you. It is also true but as the article says, “chilling”, that the characters disappear throughout the play because they died during the Holocaust. It is true, we only hear from the survivors because there is no way to get the stories from most people who perished outside of the few obvious examples. I really do hope I will get a chance to see this show before it closes because it resonates so much with me as I have family history with this kind of situation.
I have been looking forward to seeing Leopoldstadt since I first heard of it. This story is particularly interesting to me because I am also Jewish. I have felt the same feelings that are talked about in this article of wanting to forget or suppress my Jewish heritage and then later feeling bad for wanting to forget about it. Now, I feel proud to say I'm Jewish. While I am not religious at all, Judaism is still a large part of who I am. I am both ethnically and culturally Jewish and that is not something that I want to forget about and move away from. I think it is important to connect with our history. Many of my ancestors were persecuted or killed for their religion and so while I don't believe in god and I don't practice the religion, I still try to honor them by practicing and continuing my Jewish culture.
As a Jewish person in the theater sphere it is both refreshing and disheartening to see this play hit the Broadway stage. On the refreshing side, it is really wonderful to see Judaism and its culture represented in the mainstream. It is even better that the director Patrick Marber, the playwright Tom Stoppard, and most (if not all) of the cast are Jewish people rather than people playing Jews. The disheartening side of this is that the story has to be about the tragedies of Judaism. Obviously I would love to see a more cheerful Jewish tale be told but sadly, most popular Jewish stories are Holocaust-adjacent as it affected all of us. I would do anything to see this show and hope that it has a long run so that I can make it the next time I am in New York. I love Tom Stoppard's work (I did a scene from Arcadia in high school) but to me, this is the most important thing he has done.
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