Tom Stoppard’s Secret—And Mine

In 2023, I went to New York to see Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, about a Jewish family in Vienna before World War II. It was the final work Stoppard produced before his death late last year, at the age of 88, and the most personal play of his career. By the time the story ends, in the 1950s, only three members of the family are still alive, including Leo, who escaped to Britain as a child refugee and has no knowledge of his Jewish heritage. Leo’s story mirrors Stoppard’s own: Born in 1937 as Tomas Straussler, he and his family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and eventually settled in London. Not until he was in his 50s did Stoppard learn that he was Jewish and that his grandparents had been murdered in the Holocaust.