Saturday, November 29, 2025
From Ian:
John Podhoretz: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025
John Podhoretz: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025
That essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” was about all Stoppard had to say about his relation to Jewishness and Judaism over the course of the following two decades. But then, according to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.'”Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ dies at 87
This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”
That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”
The richness of the assimilated existences of the Jews of turn-of-the-century Vienna whose Christmas celebration (!) we witness at the play’s beginning is revealed in all its fragility almost immediately; success for the family’s richest member comes in part from his converting to Christianity, but the converted man is soon humiliated for his Jewishness by his wife’s Austrian military-officer lover. The first act features a passionate argument about Zionism and Herzl’s The Jewish State, and the great shadow cast over the rest of the proceedings is if the people in that apartment had heeded Herzl’s call and understood his ideas, they would have moved to Palestine and lived.
Leopoldstadt is a great work of art, and not a tract, but it is the most explicitly Zionist work of art of our time—though the point seems to have sailed over the heads of most of the people who wrote about it in words of extravagant praise. Its celebration and success capped Stoppard’s career not a moment too soon. Because, of course, had he written it three years later and had it been staged in London and New York after October 7th, its Zionism would have been unavoidable to all who saw it, and there would have been protests against it outside the theaters that showed it.
Tom Stoppard chose to stop “living as without history” by writing Leopoldstadt, and in so doing, he brought his career to its apogee with an earnest and passionate piece of work in which he played none of the linguistic games that had made him famous. He wanted to make it known that we must all live with history, with the knowledge of history, with the lessons of history, and not have them erased—either by parents whose journeys were too painful to share with their children and grandchildren or by those who seem determined to forget so that they can commit the same crimes anew, the crimes their grandparents and great-grandparents committed. Tom Stoppard did not live the life of a Jew, but in writing Leopoldstadt, he contributed to the treasure-house of civilization, and for that, he deserves eternal honor. He did good for his people and for the West. May Tom Stoppard’s memory be for a blessing.
Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse.Scarlett Johansson: I was asked not to make a film about the Holocaust
The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.
Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.
In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England.
Boarding school followed at Pocklington in Yorkshire, northern England, where Tom Stoppard loved cricket more than drama and learned how to be British, which Major Stoppard considered the ultimate nationality.
The adult Stoppard, who rediscovered decades later the Jewish roots that he explored in his final play, would accuse his stepfather of "an innate antisemitism."
He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.
"I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life," he wrote in Talk, a US magazine, in 1999, reflecting on returning with his brother to their birthplace Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic.
In Scarlett Johansson’s first film as director, an elderly Jewish woman falsely claims to be a Holocaust survivor after an innocent misunderstanding spins out of control. A month before filming was due to begin, one of Johansson’s financial backers got in touch with a stipulation regarding the script. The gist of it? Love the film, Scarlett, but we’re not so keen on the whole Holocaust thing. Can we have the character lie about something else?
The demand came “after months of preparatory work”, Johansson recalls, despairingly. “I mean, if they’d said ‘I’ll only back this if you shoot in New Jersey,’ or ‘We need to get this done by the spring’, then that would have been one thing. But they were objecting to what the film actually was. It had to be about what happens when someone gets caught in the worst lie imaginable; if not the Holocaust, then what could it be? They offered no alternative. It was just, ‘This is an issue.’”
The Avengers and Marriage Story star stuck to her guns. So the backer pulled out and, with just weeks to go, a significant portion of the $9m (£6.8m) budget disappeared overnight. “We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome?” she says. “It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.” Fortunately, an emergency ring-round soon brought Sony Pictures Classics on board as distributors – the studio made up the shortfall, and filming went ahead as planned. tmg.video.placeholder.alt wZ6l2ue--KA
Time was of the essence – not least because Johansson’s leading lady, June Squibb, who had recently celebrated her 94th birthday, was only available for a few weeks. (The redoubtable star of Nebraska and Thelma turned 96 earlier this month.)
Today the two women are sitting side by side in a mirrored salon overlooking the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes. Squibb is wearing a colourful silk kimono; Johansson, a white cotton tea dress. Their film, Eleanor the Great, had its world premiere at the town’s festival the previous day, which Johansson attended with her husband, the Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost. She and Squibb have just had lunch together, and I’m joining them for coffee and chocolates.
