Tom Stoppard, playwright whose last work explored his family’s buried Holocaust history

(JTA) — Tom Stoppard had already won four Tony Awards during his prolific career as a playwright when he penned what would be his final staged work, dealing with his family’s Holocaust history.

Already in his 80s, Stoppard wrote Leopoldstadt to explore a past he said he had thought was not relevant to his life — until he realized that it was. The play, which portrayed a Jewish family grappling with how to respond to rising antisemitic ferment in their native Vienna, won the Tony for best play after it opened on Broadway in 2022.

“I thought that the subject of the Jews through the war had been done and done,” Stoppard told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “But actually, not really!”

The prize bookended more than five decades of awards for Stoppard, who died Saturday, Nov. 29 at 88.

“He will be remembered for his works, for their brilliance and humanity, and for his wit, his irreverence, his generosity of spirit and his profound love of the English language,” his family said in a statement announcing his death at home in Dorset, England.

Born in 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, Stoppard emerged from a wartime ordeal that claimed his father and — although he would not know it for years — saw all four of his grandparents murdered in Nazi concentration camps to become one of the world’s most productive and celebrated playwrights.

Stoppard authored dozens of plays throughout his career, sometimes premiering more than one a year on London’s West End. Five — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1968), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1986), The Coast of Utopia (2007) and Leopoldstadt — later won best play when they transferred to Broadway in New York City.

He also won the Academy Award for best screenplay in 1998 for Shakespeare in Love and was nominated for the prize another time, in 1985 for Brazil.

Not all of his contributions bore his name. Stephen Spielberg said Stoppard had done an uncredited rewrite on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and that he had been “pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue” in that 1989 film.

The Indiana Jones movie centered on the main character’s quest to free his father, who had been captured by the Nazis — an echo of autobiography for Stoppard, though he would not first stare down his own family’s fatal encounters with the Nazis for several more years.
Stoppard’s own biological father had been killed during World War II in Singapore, where the family had moved the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. Eugen Straussler worked as a doctor for a shoe company whose owner had arranged for his Jewish employees to transfer to locations outside of Europe. The family was largely assimilated: Stoppard would later write about his mother, Martha, “Hitler made her Jewish in 1939.”

As the Japanese closed in on Singapore, Martha sought refuge in India with Stoppard and his brother. His father stayed behind to support Singapore’s defense and was killed during the Japanese occupation. (Stoppard at first believed Straussler had died in captivity but later learned he had fled on a ship that was torpedoed by the Japanese.)

Stoppard’s mother remarried a British man in India who adopted her sons, giving them both the Stoppard name and entry to England, where Stoppard would soon become, in his words, “a British schoolboy.” After graduating from elite prep schools, he forwent university to head straight for the West End, where he soon made his mark.

His early identity, and certainly the Jewish family he had left behind in Czechoslovakia were, by Stoppard’s account, firmly detached from his creative imagination as his works ricocheted across a diverse array of topics, frequently employing the lens of real historical figures alongside the highbrow intellectualism for which he was known.

“Stoppard’s plays have been suffused with wit and wordplay and asked essential questions about how we live, love, die, and explore the depth of the human condition,” said the literary free speech organization PEN America, which honored Stoppard multiple times for his advocacy work, in a statement upon his death. “The world of contemporary theater will forever bear his mark.”

A sign of possible Jewish connection came in 1986; he organized a demonstration in London on behalf of Soviet Jews that included other British celebrities and the U.S. senator Bill Bradley. But he said he replied to letters thanking him as a Jew that he was “not really Jewish.” It was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that he would learn about the depth of his own Jewish identity.

In 1993, a relative from the new, free Czech Republic named Sarka wrote to his mother saying that she would like to reconnect. At a meeting in London — whose location his mother selected to avoid her husband, who Stoppard said harbored many prejudices — Sarka sketched out a family tree that Stoppard had never seen.

The occasion prompted an exchange that would shape Stoppard’s final work. “How Jewish were we?” he said he asked Sarka, having grown up being told that the Nazis targeted anyone with a Jewish grandparent. “You were completely Jewish,” she told him, shattering what he said he had been “almost willful purblindness, a rarely disturbed absence of curiosity combined with an endless willingness not to disturb my mother by questioning her.”

Sarka revealed the grim toll of the Holocaust on Stoppard’s family. His mother’s brother had survived, but their three sisters were murdered, two at Auschwitz. Both sets of his grandparents, too, had been killed — his mother’s parents sometime in 1942 and his father’s parents at Terezin in 1944.

The next year in Prague, where he was speaking at a PEN conference, he was approached in his hotel lobby by a man bearing a photo album. Inside, Stoppard would later recount, was a picture of him and his brother, prompting an even deeper reconnection with the family he had left behind as a toddler. He would visit Zlin, his hometown, and meet people who knew his father as a doctor — including a young girl, now an older woman, whose hand he had stitched after she broke a pane of glass.

In Leopoldstadt, those stitches are transformed into a mark and a memory for the character based on himself, Leo, a young British man with no recollection of his past as a Jew in Austria. The play won accolades for its presentation of the dangers of assimilation at a time of rising antisemitism, though it also drew criticism for giving relatively short shrift to Leo’s own excavation of his identity.

For his part, Stoppard said that while he had dwelled in his later work on his own past, Judaism had never come to feel like an active component of his identity or artistic outlook.

“It’s not a very elegant phrase, but I could say I didn’t factor in my Jewishness,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2022. “I just live my life and let the Jewishness take care of itself.”

Yet that was not always the case for those around him. In an essay published last year, the playwright recalled that his adoptive father had asked him to drop the Stoppard name after he first began demonstrating the “tribalism” of Jewish identity back when he demonstrated on behalf of Soviet Jews. By then, he was firmly established as one of the world’s greatest living playwrights. “I wrote back,” he recounted, “that this was not practical.”

Stoppard, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, four children and several grandchildren.