Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 2, 2020

JEWISH 20th-century history is so often presented as one long justification for the project of Jewish national renewal, a narrative which today dominates mainstream Jewish community life and deeply influences political attitudes towards Israel by Western countries.

So it is curious to see Tom Stoppards new play Leopoldstadt, which chronicles three generations of mid-European Jewish history, leaving zionism offstage.

Stoppard discovered his own Jewish heritage late in life. His four grandparents were all murdered in the Holocaust and I expected to see zionism waiting in the wings as a potential redemptive finale or at the very least an answer to the human costs of being Jewish.

Instead, Stoppard chooses his own tragic reading of the Jewish predicament, keeping his characters locked within their own family tragedy.

Leopoldstadt, which Stoppard says may well be his last major stage play, is set in Vienna and follows the fortunes of a prosperous, highly assimilated and intermarried extended Jewish family from 1899 to 1955.

In the opening scene with the Merz and Jakobovicz clans, the children are dressing the family Christmas tree in an opulent apartment with servants on hand.

Its a perfect illustration of the religiously ambiguous, multi-dimensional identity thats been created in just a few decades following Jewish emancipation in the Austro-Hungarianempire.

The family is wealthy, privileged and highly cultured. My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat and I have the singers to dinner, Hermann Mertz says.

He has married Gretl, a Catholic, and hes commissioned Gustav Klimt the real-life Viennese artist to paint her portrait. Meanwhile their son, Jacob, is both baptised and circumcised. We see him attempting to top the Christmas tree with a Star of David before having his mistake pointed out by his Jewish grandmother.

In was in this same cultural environment that Theodor Herzl published his zionist manifesto Der Judenstaat in 1896, and a copy is on hand in the Merz family apartment.

But Hermann describes it as idiocy and is literally putting his money on culture as the route to Jewish acceptance: When we make money, thats what the money is for, to put us at the beating heart of Viennese culture.

This is the Promised Land, and not because its some place where my ancestors came from. Were Austrians now. Austrians of Jewish descent!

Hermanns brother-in-law Ludwig is no zionist either, pointing out that its the antisemites of Vienna who are the most enthusiastic supporters of Herzls pamphlet. But he does recount a visit to his family in Galicia in Eastern Europe where, he derogatively observes, Herzels book was going around like an infection.

Its ordinary Jews, says Ludwig, that really understand what antisemitism means. Hermann remains unconvinced and doesnt buy the story of perennial Jewish catastrophe. The humbler and persecuted Jewish masses living in the east are never referred to again throughout the play.

As the story progresses and we see the children of 1899 grow to be adults, every possible Jewish route to integration, acceptance and respect is tried out apart from zionism. The Jewish nationalism proposed by Herzl finds no advocates or champions within the large family of grandparents, siblings and cousins across three generations.

Intermarriage, cultural patronage, Habsburg patriotism, psychoanalysis and socialism are all explored, along with their limited success or ultimate failure.

Whenever zionism crops up in conversation, its knocked back and mocked. In a scene set in 1924 Merz, now a wounded first world war veteran, chides his cousin Nellie for her socialist leanings and ironically recommends that she joins the Jewish foothold in Palestine: Given time, instead of having to join other peoples revolutions, you could rebel against your own ruling class.

Nellie responds that there are more important things now than being a Jew. But Jacob gets the last word and foretells the approaching darkness: You wave your flag, the Jews will get blamed anyway.

The play ends in 1955 as three surviving cousins meet in the old Merz home. Rosa is a Freudian analyst in New York, having left Austria in the 1920s, Auschwitz survivor Nathan has returned to Vienna to become a mathematics lecturer like his great uncle Ludwig and Leonard, son of the socialist Nellie, escaped to England just before the horror.

Part of a tour of humorists organised by the British government, he is perhaps the closest character we get to Stoppard himself.

Nathan makes the plays one last jibe at zionism as he recalls the Vienna he returned to in 1949. In the same breath, he couples the classic British film noir thriller The Third Man with the establishment of the state of Israel.

The father of modern zionism and the ruthless racketeer Harry Lime are sharing the same space in Nathans mind: Orson Welles was up on the Big Wheel. Theodor Herzls coffin was being dug up for reburial in Jerusalem.

So, right to the very end, there is no respectful presentation of zionism. Ten years after the war, with the Jewish state now established, theres still no suggestion that Jewish nationalism is, or could be, the only sane idea left to battle antisemitism after culture, intermarriage, patriotism and socialism have all failed.

Stoppard is a great artist, well used to dealing with big ideas and the intersection between the personal and political and I hope this isnt his last play or his last Jewish-themed work.

Jewish history does not stop at the Holocaust. Today zionism/Israel has created for Jews new ethical dilemmas, new ambiguities and new constructions of reality which may also prove to be false messiahs.

Thats got to be a Stoppard play worth writing.

Leopoldstadt runs at Wyndham's Theatre in London until June 30, box office: wyndhamstheatre.co.uk

See the article here:
OPINION Zionism conspicuous by its absence - Morning Star Online

Category: Zionism
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