Tom Stoppard’s Jewish roots: Carey Perloff on Broadway’s acclaimed play of the season

“Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s stunning new play on Broadway about a highly cultivated extended family in Vienna that was decimated in the Holocaust, isn’t autobiographical. In your book you argue that though “Stoppard often says that he has no idea what it means to ‘be’ Jewish since he does not practice the religion and does not feel part of any coherent group, there is something in his delight in pedagogy, dialectic, argument, and finding the perfect word that connects him clearly to a long line of Jewish thought and intellectual behavior.” You quote a character in “Leopoldstadt” who proclaims, “We literally worship culture” — a sentiment clearly shared by his author. Stoppard has always admired my mother’s work so much — and when he read her memoir “The Vienna Paradox,” about escaping Vienna in 1938, he was captivated. Joshua Satine as Young Jacob in Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt” at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre.