It hasn’t been unusual for artistic greats to reach deep into their own souls when delivering their swan songs. In “Leopoldstadt,” opening this week on Broadway, Sir Tom Stoppard has done exactly that, as reviews, including in these pages, have widely observed. Yet there’s a political side to the story that is riveting. 

Ostensibly the narrative more or less mirrors the scribe’s own family history. Born Tomáš Sträussler to Jewish parents in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his family fled Nazi occupation a few years later. After his father died, his mother married a major, Kenneth Stoppard, in the British Army and settled in England. 

The young Stoppard knew little of his history and family heritage until the 1990’s, when a cousin informed him that, among other things, all four of his grandparents had been murdered by the Nazis, as had his mother’s two sisters. 

“Leopoldstadt” is named for Vienna’s 2nd municipal district, which was known before the Holocaust for its large Jewish population. It’s this setting that added a personal touch to my own experience at New York’s Longacre Theater.

Both of my grandmothers spent their early childhoods in the Leopoldstadt district. One, on Liechtensteinstraße, in a secular family. The other, blocks away on Lilienbrunngasse, the daughter of a chasidic rabbi.

The play tells the story, over half a century, of a world that was decimated. In the process, the various family members grapple with Jewish identity, their permanent outsider status in Austrian society, and the various political movements of the time. 

It’s a familiar story, one shared in some form or another by countless Jewish families. In my own case, one grandmother was saved posing as a Catholic girl at a nunnery near Nice, France. The other, like young Stoppard, escaped to London at the age of nine, days after witnessing Kristallnacht. Both of her parents and many other relatives were killed by the Nazis.  

The play’s commentary on the perpetual battle against prejudice, has been noted by reviewers, the actors and producers, including Stoppard himself. Its singular focus on the evils of antisemitism less so. 

Little noticed further is the play’s implicit message on the futility of assimilationist movements and its overt nod to the salvation of Zionism and the reestablishment of a Jewish state. 

Stoppard, in an interview a year ago with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, downplayed his own intentions. “Theater is a storytelling art form,” he said. “I don’t think of myself as a polemicist. So, I’m not, as it were, hauling my play forward thinking about what it must speak to the people. No, all I’m doing is, in my mind, telling a story.” 

Yet, like all great wordsmiths, his influence is subtle, delicate, but unmistakable. In the opening scene in the family’s living room, still in the good times of 1899, a debate rages between brothers-in-law Hermann Merz, a convert to Christianity, and Ludwig Jakobovicz over Zionist visionary Theodore Herzl’s newly published treatise Der Judenstaat. 

The matter is scarcely mentioned again. Yet, 56 years later, post-Holocaust, the pitiful remnants of a once great family gather in the same living room. They recount their futile efforts to flee Nazi terror and how the United States failed to even meet its minimum quota for Austrian refugees. 

Then, in the play’s most solemn moment, as the names and fates of each lost family member are announced, the victor of the dramatic debate all those years earlier could not be clearer. 

“There is no room for victory in this curious realm of fragile healing,” the poet Leonard Cohen once told me of his work as a man of words. 

“Leopoldstadt” is a play that at once afflicts and ignites the soul. Like Cohen, there is nothing triumphant in Stoppard’s message. Neither, though, is there room for doubt.