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.
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.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
