Tom Stoppard constructs a world that was lost to history in “Leopoldstadt” about the Merz-Jacobovitch family of wealthy, assimilated Jews in early 20th century Vienna.
“Leopoldstadt” opens the Huntington Theatre’s 2024–25 season on Sept. 17th and will run until Oct. 12. Directed by Carey Perloff, the play covers 50 years of family history as their world is torn apart by the rise of religious, social, and nationalist movements against them in Europe after the Holocaust.
The family is never physically in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s Jewish Quarter, often referred to as the “old country.” The play instead takes place in their parlor. Perloff chooses to set the stage as almost unchanged, dominated by the same blue walls, white curtains, and wooden floors.
Projections are used to show changes of time period or setting, such as the image of the Torah on Passover, which lets the audience see what our characters are thinking.
The family’s relationship with their home is how they view their relationship with the world. Just like in the musical “Cabaret” with the Kit Kat Club, one can either admit the world is becoming darker and find a way out or enjoy the ignorance and disappear later, a dilemma that defines much of the inter-family conflict throughout the play.
What’s most important is that playwright Stoppard is also a Holocaust survivor. Stoppard, (birth name Tomás Straussler), was born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia in 1938. His family fled the country when the Nazis invaded on March 15, 1939. There is no wonder why it is referred to as his most “personal play.”
For Stoppard, this is a time he can compare to life for Jews in the U.K. and U.S. in that many Jews in Vienna were deeply assimilated, in-part due to many converting to Catholicism and Protestantism, like Hermann Merz, played by Nael Nacer, epitomizes. He boasts that these individuals made up “50% of all university graduates,” owned “10% of the city’s wealth,” and delivered the likes of Mahler, Schoenberg, Freud, and Zweig.
Firdous Bamji plays the role of Ludwig as a skeptic of Vienna. He rants intensely over the increasing antisemitism, all denied by Hermann, the patriarch of the family, who only a few scenes later, is told by an officer despite the family’s standing and assimilated upper-class Christian convert status, Hermann is “a Jew or of impure blood—not a Christian, not an Austrian, not even a wealthy businessman, just a Jew.”
Stoppard is making the point that despite the world that many of us, Jews and Gentiles alike, live happily in, the opportunity for greater discrimination only requires the many to ignore these signs and for us to live in our parlors, where overrated family heirlooms alone can keep us dreaming. I believe this play will change lives, and the tears shed are worth your time to ensure that no one will ignore the signs of hate.
These two sentiments, nearly 40 years in between, show how Hermann’s belief that Vienna would be the “promised land,” has failed him and his family. Throughout the show, many tears were shed from the audience—from the shock of hearing Nazis shouting at the family, to hearing the horrible histories of unfulfilled immigration quotas. The play offers a catharsis that rivals most tragedies, and I believe it must be heard because it depicts the truth, not only about an end to life in Europe nor what we won with the war, but what we lost
As someone who shares a similar background of a family of “Viennese Jews” who were from Leopoldstadt, the show held special significance. In 1934, my Grandpa Sigmund, his siblings, and parents escaped from Berlin, while three of his cousins, still in Vienna, escaped on the Kinder transports. They were the only ones who made it, with the rest of the family deported to Auschwitz or dying in the ghettos. My grandfather’s cousin Bina, who at 96 is still with us, never truly recovered from her family’s demise by the Nazis and lives a very religious life that gives her meaning to the cruel world who allowed the Nazis to liquidate six million souls.
As Stoppard writes of his mother in the playwright’s essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” “As ‘being Jewish’ didn’t figure in her life until it disrupted it … Hitler made her Jewish in 1939.” What Stoppard means by showing his mother’s detachment from her Jewishness is not that her assimilation or detachment mattered, only that she was still Jewish and therefore an enemy alien of the intolerant, like all the seven million Jews of Europe in 1939—and this is no less true 85 years later.
The message which Stoppard is trying to convey to the audience seems to be that we are still in the struggle of Leopoldstadt, the mindset that we are intolerant, when antisemitism and potential for destruction is all-around us. When you look at international statistics on hate crimes, antisemitism is up this year by 360% in the U.S., according to the Anti-Defamation League. You can see this plays significance to our modern day discussions on the memory of oppressed peoples everywhere, and should be heard to promote this history, which was ended through the erasure of Jewish life through the nationalist program of the Nazis and should serve as a reminder to hold the past’s lost souls in remembrance forever.
