Playwright Tom Stoppard grapples with his hidden past in latest work - PBS NewsHour
Jeffrey Brown:
The year is 1899, Vienna.
The members of the Merz clan, an assimilated Jewish family in which a confused grandchild can put a Star of David atop a Christmas tree, feel themselves full members of our highly cultured Viennese society and Austro-Hungarian empire.
Over the coming years and generations, they will learn how wrong they are. Nearly every family member we meet in the play "Leopoldstadt" will be killed or die as a result of the Holocaust.
It's a devastating story of a family tree cut down, one that's impacting audiences and playwright Tom Stoppard himself in ways he hadn't expected.
(snip)
Tom Stoppard, the English playwright, was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His parents, Jewish on both sides, took him and his brother to Singapore to escape the Nazi invasion. His father was killed by the Japanese, and his mother fled again, taking her sons to India, where she later married an Englishman.
At age 8, young Tom was brought to England, his Jewish past and family left behind.
Was it a question of knowing, or a suppressed past, or a lack of desire to know about it?
Sir Tom Stoppard:
All of the above. My mother was very relieved to have found sanctuary for herself and her two sons when the war ended. She didn't want to look back, and she never spoke about the past, except just very casually occasionally. And I also have to own up to not really having sufficient curiosity about it, partly because my mother didn't want to talk about it.
(snip)
Jeffrey Brown:
"Leopoldstadt" is the result of years of reckoning with a history Stoppard only learned about in full in his 50s, when a Czech relative told him that all four of his Jewish grandparents and three of his mother's sisters had been murdered by the Nazis. The play's family is not his, but their experiences would have been similar.
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/playwright-tom-stoppard-grapples-with-his-hidden-past-in-latest-work