Why did Carroll love this book?
Much has been written about the Holocaust but enough can never be said. Tom Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a non-observant Jewish family forced to flee the Nazi terror.
In his play Leopoldstadt Stoppard follows the history of a family living in that Jewish suburb of Vienna, from the turn of the 20th century to today. The story of the prejudice and restrictions they experienced, as well as the hopes they had of transcending them through business success and assimilation, are heartbreaking. A friend of mine came from such a family and from his recollections I know that Stoppard has described the situation accurately.
This play (as the family) is full of characters you care about deeply, and knowing about the coming Holocaust, we want to cry out a warning to them. We can’t. But this is a warning about the future.
1 author picked Leopoldstadt as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna. But Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptised Jew married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. Gathered in the Merz apartment in a fashionable part of the city, Hermann's extended family are at the heart of Tom Stoppard's epic yet intimate drama. By the time we have taken leave of them, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and - for Austrian Jews - the Holocaust in which 65,000 of them were murdered. It is…
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