Tom Stoppard’s holocaust play begins in 1899 on a stage teeming with life. The extended Merz family, assimilated Viennese Jews, some of them Christian converts or married to Christians, are celebrating the holidays. While the adults discuss Klimt, Mahler, Herzl and the Jewish question, children run in and out and one puts a Star of David on top of the Christmas tree. Grandma Emilia regrets that no one remembers some of the people in the photos she’s leafing through. “It’s like a second death to lose your name in a family album,” she observes, introducing Stoppard’s main concern in this play: remembering family.
I found myself losing the names of all these family members, yet Stoppard keeps introducing more characters (the cast numbers more than 30), as we jump from 1899 to 1924 and then to 1938, the evening of Kristallnacht.
The play is, in fact, overstuffed and we have little chance to get to know these people as individuals. We experience, rather, a rich and complex family life, which may indeed be precisely the point. We are not witnessing individual tragedy here so much as the eradication of whole families.
Stoppard is never less than engaging, and I enjoyed the rich debates between Hermann and Ludwig on the place of Jews in Vienna. But much of the play is static, and really only comes to life in 1938. Family members now wear overcoats as they huddle at a table in the same living room we saw earlier. The mathematician Ludwig, now an old man, teaches young Nathan and Leo the mysteries of the string game cat’s cradle, while they all listen to the glass shattering outside and wait for the inevitable knock on the door.
But the heart of the play lies in the final scene, set in 1955, again in the same living room but now practically a bare stage: a few chairs, a piano with the old photo album on it, only three characters: Nathan and Leo, now young adults, and Nathan’s aunt Rosa.
Rosa, who was one of the small children in the first scene of the play, lived in New York during the Nazi takeover. Nathan, an adolescent in 1938, is the sole family member to survive Auschwitz. And Leo, eight years old in 1938, flourished when his widowed mother escaped Vienna and married an Englishman. Now a writer, he is meeting Rosa for the first time, Nathan for the first time since he was a child.
Leo Chamberlain (born Leo Rosenbaum) is now a smug 25-year-old Englishman, sympathetic to this family that suffered so much, but not seeing how it touches him. He speaks of his “charmed life” and pride in Britain: “You know … fair play and Parliament and freedom of everything, asylum for exiles and refugees, the Royal Navy, the royal family.”
Nathan has no use for Leo’s “charmed life”:
No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.
Stoppard has said that he wrote the play in order to make this speech.
Leo is clearly an alternate version of the playwright himself. Tomás Straussler was not yet two when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. His mother escaped to India with her two children, where she met and married an English army officer. After the war the Stoppards moved to England, where Tom and his brother were raised as proper Englishmen. His mother told them nothing of their family history.
Only when he was nearing 60 did Stoppard meet relatives who told him what his mother had not. He was Jewish on both sides: all four of his grandparents died in death camps, as did three of his mother’s sisters.
He tells this story in his 1999 essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish.” Many were fascinated by this disclosure, but not everyone was impressed. The Croatian novelist Daša Drndić took Stoppard to task:
[Stoppard] learns that his grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, all of them disappeared as if they had never lived, which, as far as he is concerned, they had not, and he goes back to his lovely English language and his one and only royal homeland.
Stoppard, according to his biographer, Hermione Lee, understood the accusation. That he would create such a smugly English alter ego in this play suggests that he did indeed take the rebuke to heart.
His use of a cat’s cradle as metaphor may also suggest how he came to understand what he had neglected.
Nathan, who will become a mathematician himself, delights his uncle when he observes that, regardless of the shape created, the knots always stay the same distance from one another. They can’t show up anywhere they like—just as Nathan will later point out to Leo that he can’t just show up in England with no connections and no prior history.
Stoppard himself, like Leo, may have thought that he could ignore his heritage and be fully English. This imperfect but moving play has arisen out of the playwright’s struggle to learn how his own life is part of a cat’s cradle, one that inevitably connects him to all the other points in his complex family story.
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