The more numerous the bevy of cousins introduced in the first scene, the heavier our foreknowledge of the genocide in waiting. Leopoldstadt is a story of a populous Austro-Hungarian Jewish family from the beginning of the twentieth century to the aftermath of the Holocaust. Only now, with Leopoldstadt, does the playwright attempt for the first time to “possess by articulation” his own family history. It is fifty-four years since his first big success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, established him as a major presence in British theater. The leonine British playwright Tom Stoppard has made a grand career from “fancy language,” his reputation built on hyper-literary dark comedies like Arcadia (in which Lord Byron plays a crucial, off-stage role) and The Invention of Love (about the poet-classicist A.E. It meant not rushing to possess by articulation, or even to explain what might have been beyond explanation, while the thing itself was still warm and its consequences still unfolding.” Jacobson went on to remind us how the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, “who as a boy was transported to a labour camp and later spent three years foraging and in hiding, wrote of ‘learning silence’ as a mode of forgetting, burying ‘the bitter memories deep in the bedrock of the soul, in a place where no stranger’s eye, not even our own, could get to them.’” In a recent article for The Guardian on the subject of the film Jojo Rabbit, the British novelist Howard Jacobson expanded on Theodor Adorno’s famous maxim “No poetry after Auschwitz.” Adorno’s admonition, Jacobson explained, “didn’t simply mean no fancy language. Ed Stoppard as Ludwig, Alexis Zegerman as Eva, Faye Castelow as Gretl, and Adrian Scarborough as Hermann in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, directed by Patrick Marber at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 2020
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