Leopoldstadt
by Tom Stoppard
Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.” ― Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt
This play is both a historical and philosophical drama as well as a highly personal challenge from Stoppard, who didn't discover that he was Jewish until his 50s when a distant cousin got in touch with him. The author appears to make up for lost time with Leopoldstadt, a first-rate, epic, and impassioned declaration of his own origins. He asserts that forgetting one's forefathers is tragic in and of itself. To lose your name in a family album, as one character puts it, "is like a second death."
It is yet another play by Tom Stoppard that impressed me with its erudition and singular structure. But there was an undercurrent of emotion that built over the length of reading the play that overwhelmed me by the final scene. So many of the family members had succumbed to tragic ends over the course of the family history that there was a nostalgia of lives lived that was was dressed in the end with widows' weeds of death.
2 comments:
Hi James, Tom Stoppard is a writer I have known about but I have never read him because I don't read plays all that much. But this play sounds so powerful and I looked up his bio and Stoddard learned that all four of his grandparents died at Auschwitz and other camps. I can only imagine the effect learning about the tragic and terrible fate of his grandparents must have had on him. Thank you for telling us about this and my TBR list is growing daily but this is a must read play.
Kathy,
Thanks for your observations. I'm a fan of Stoppard having seen most of his plays (thanks to a robust theater environment here in Chicago) and read several. In addition to this short play I would recommend his great trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia", about Alexander Herzen and the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia.
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