Out of the Jewish Closet

Tom Stoppard’s discovery of his Jewish identity late in life has made me think

that maybe in his first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, he identified with Rosencrantz

whose identity as Jew was cleverly concealed by him as by the Bard, a link

with Stoppard, whose non-Jewish name would not have saved him from dying in the Jewish Totentanz

if he had not been able to escape from what fomented in a far more rotten state

than Denmark, permeated by pernicious anti-Jewish hate,

while if Leopoldstadt had been Tom’s first play, written outside the Jewish closet, he’d have been regarded

as a Jewish playwright, not discriminated against, perhaps, but disregarded.

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In “Tom Stoppard and the Failure of ‘Diasporism,’” Commentary, January, 2023, Howard Husock, discussing Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, writes:

Leopoldstadt’s invocation of a potential Jewish state at the play’s beginning, and Israel’s existence at its end, as the tiny remnant of the Merz and Jacobowicz families gathers in the once-grand apartment of assimilation in 1955, mark it as one of the most profoundly Zionist documents of our time…..’

It is a reflection of the durability and power of anti-Semitism that, even if the playwright had uncovered the facts of his own Jewish past in 1955 the way his young British character does, rather than in the 1980s, he would have risked a great deal by writing Leopoldstadt as a young man in the wake of his career-making success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966. He likely would have become known as a Jewish, rather than a British, playwright—a dramatist making a special pleading due to the tragedy visited upon his own family. No, it was his established reputation as the greatest living English dramatist that has enabled this unlikely production—among other things, Leopoldstadt has a cast of 38, the largest any play on Broadway has seen in generations.