There Is No Time

On the Shoah, art, and 'Leopoldstadt'

Mar 17, 2023

Generally speaking, I do not feel the need to absorb Holocaust-themed art in the form of books, documentaries, feature films, plays, and visual artworks. Nor do I run to Holocaust museums nor plan trips to the site of Nazi death camps and other sites commemorating the massacre or genocide of Jews. All this stuff, I figure, is for the rest of the people who do not know nor understand nor feel in their very bones what the Holocaust was about.

Thanks to my family history and my upbringing, I am fully aware, to a nauseating extent, of the ultimate result of Nazism. There are the ancestors I never knew, those who were cut down in their prime. There are the cousins I never had, the empty branches of the family tree. There was my beloved maternal grandmother who, had her parents not been divorced, probably would never have immigrated from Poland to New York City in the mid-1920s. Instead, she would have lived another decade-and-a-half before, like the rest of the family she left behind, being locked up inside a synagogue in Radomsk and being burned alive. And alas, dear reader, you would therefore not be reading these words just as sure as I would not be around to write them.

The horrors of the Holocaust were ingrained in me, if not in my DNA (although there is scientific basis for believing that they were), from an early age by the silences of some elderly family members and the dramatic, fear-inducing outbursts of others (thanks, Mom). I have gone through periods in my life when I was obsessed with this history, on the familial level as well as on a tribal level, and it has not always put me in good stead or been to my advantage to be reflecting so deeply and continually about this vile inheritance that has colored my life with pain, regret, shame, anger, and fear. I have also found ways to overcome those emotions and psychological complexes, not through any kind of repression or successful processing of the truly unbelievable crime committed against my family and my people, but through a variety of strategies and understandings and beliefs that have at the very least allowed me to function, to live a life with a modicum of equanimity balancing out the ever-present anxiety and depression that was apparently my birthright and my curse.

So, no, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the educational trips to Auschwitz, Schindler’s List, and the various iterations of the Anne Frank story—that sort of thing is for the rest of you—although I don’t for a minute think it will do anything to wake people up or make them feel differently or change people’s minds that need changing. It is just as likely, I believe, that for some, perhaps even many, immersion in the gruesome realities of the Shoah can serve the agenda of those who are already inclined to believe the wildest and most awful stereotypes of Jews. These sorts of cultural and historical fixtures are just as likely to encourage the hate as they are to discourage the tendencies that brought about the genocide of European Jewry just seventy-five years ago.

It is not as if I haven’t read dozens of books about Hitler, the Shoah, and antisemitism. Yes, I eventually watched Schindler’s List and was horrified by the scene in which the Jews in a death camp were corralled into a communal shower and, expecting to be gassed, were overjoyed when water came out of the showerheads and not Zyklon-B. How could Steven Spielberg have done this? I understand it was part of creating drama, tension and release, in preparation for a follow-up scene in which the gas replaced the water spraying out of the showerheads. But didn’t Spielberg realize that millions of proto- and crypto-Nazis would focus in on the first shower, and use it as “evidence” that Jews were not gassed in death camps?

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There have been film and literary attempts to deal with this material that have been successful at telling the stories of individuals living through and amidst the horrors that have transcended the simplistic to achieve something lasting and meaningful in the face of the meaningless atrocity. By focusing closely on the story of one individual, the 2002 film The Pianist, based on a memoir by a Holocaust survivor--or as my friend, the memoirist Eleanor Reissa, prefers to call them, “Holocaust fighters”—and produced and directed by Roman Polanski, himself a Holocaust fighter, succeeded in portraying a sense of the human reality of the Shoah. Novels by Martin Amis (Time’s Arrow) and Jim Shepard (The Book of Aron)—interestingly enough, two non-Jewish authors--similarly illuminate aspects of the Nazi horror that eschew sentimentality in favor of true grit.

I began writing this essay intending to discuss the play Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard, currently running on Broadway, and which after much hemming and hawing on my part, I did go see. I came to the decision partly because it was Stoppard, one of our greatest living playwrights, and whose personal history is inextricably intertwined with the Shoah—something the playwright himself has told us he did not fully understand or appreciate until late in life. I am sometimes suspicious of such claims from people who should have known better or been more curious about their backgrounds—I’m looking at you, Madeline Albright—and I knew that in some way Leopoldstadt was Stoppard’s effort to come to terms with his personal history and that of his family, a history that, however unique, is also more common than most of us appreciate.

Leopoldstadt is not exactly a Holocaust play, although the Shoah haunts the proceedings, even as they begin in Vienna at the turn of the 20^thcentury. Rather, it is a thoughtful, brilliantly written play about assimilation and the razor’s edge Jews have walked on throughout their history in exile. Stoppard traces the family’s drama from the heights of Jewish assimilation in Viennese society, when, at the end of the nineteenth century, Viennese culture and Jewish culture were virtually synonymous, when Jews could celebrate Christmas and serve in the Austrian army and intermingle socially with non-Jews without hardly raising anyone’s eyebrow.

Or so they thought.

The plot itself is not unfamiliar, and over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, the family at the heart of the play learns the hard way that no matter how successfully they integrate with Viennese culture, where (almost) all doors are open to them, such status can all be taken away much more quickly and easily as it was amassed.

What makes the play compelling, besides the terrific acting, staging, set design—all the aspects of modern stagecraft at the top of their game—is the brilliant, dazzling writing, which we know to expect from Stoppard. The friends and family undergoing these social transitions are not stupid and unknowing—they are constantly debating and discussing the issues they face, their relationship to their ancestral faith and tribal identity, and who they can and cannot rely upon.

I simplify greatly, as I am not fond of explicating plot when talking about any narrative art form, since plot is rarely the point. As I said before, Leopoldstadt is not really a Holocaust play; rather, it is a play about assimilation. I don’t want to say “the dangers of assimilation,” because that phrase comes with a whole can of worms. But I will say this about that: as the curtain descended, and for many minutes afterward in the theater – in the lobbies, the restrooms, out front on the sidewalk – there was mostly grim silence, a silence I took to be a recognition, a startling recognition of how familiar this story from another time and another place is to our story today in this place.

Under the spell cast by the play, I whispered gravely to my wife, “This is us in five years.” Maybe I was being hyperbolic or overly dramatic. Maybe that was my long-dead mother—never one to miss an occasion to wring fear over the notion that it can happen again-- speaking through me. I do not believe we are destined to wind up following this trajectory. I do believe, however, that we certainly can and may, and, to paraphrase Lou Reed—who had a special relationship with contemporary Czech civilization (Stoppard is Czech-born)--there is no time.

Everything Is Broken

There Is No Time

On the Shoah, art, and 'Leopoldstadt'

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