Tom Stoppard, the prolific British playwright whose late-in-life discovery of his Jewish roots inspired his 2020 play “Leopoldstadt,” died at his home in Dorset, England, on Nov. 29. He was 88.
His many works include “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “The Real Thing” and “Arcadia.” He also co-authored the screenplay for the 1998 film “Shakespeare in Love,” for which he won an Academy Award, and worked on the films “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) and “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” (2005).
Born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937, Stoppard fled the Nazis with his parents and brother to Singapore in 1938. However, the family was unsettled again when the Japanese invaded in 1942, his father was killed and the family moved to India. His mother remarried a man from England, where they assimilated completely.
It was only in his 50s, after the death of his mother, that Stoppard learned of his family’s Jewish identity when relatives revealed that most of his family, including all four of his grandparents, had been murdered in the Holocaust.
In a 2024 essay titled “On Turning Out to be Jewish,” Stoppard wrote that being Jewish wasn’t a part of his mother’s life “until it disrupted it,” adding that “Hitler made her Jewish in 1939.”
After reading the Croatian novel Trieste, whose characters condemn those who “turn a blind eye” to their family histories, Stoppard wrote “Leopoldstadt” in 2020. The play follows a prosperous Viennese Jewish family across half a century, ending with a lone British-raised survivor who is told he has lived “as if without history.”
Stoppard was knighted in 1997 and awarded the Order of Merit for his contribution to literature and the arts in 2000.