The Tale of the Greatest Upset in Motorsports History

 

[Not long ago, I picked up a copy of the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday New York Times of 30 November 2025 which I’d laid aside to read later.  In “Metropolitan Diary,” a weekly column in the Times that features short, reader-submitted stories about life in New York City, I was intrigued by the very first offering:

Snappy Driver

dear diary:

As an ad man in the 1960s, I used to regularly go to a restaurant called Le Chanteclair on East 49th Street between Fifth and Madison.

The place was adorned with car racing trophies and memorabilia, and the man who ran the front of the house was from France and always elegantly dressed.

Not long ago, I picked up a book at the library called “Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best.”

Turns out the elegant Frenchman at Le Chanteclair was René Dreyfus, the driver who beat Hitler’s best.

neil fox

[What attracted me was the reference to the Jewish race car driver who beat Hitler.  I had to look that up and find out more about René Dreyfus and what race or races he won against Nazi drivers.  (The online version is entitled “Metropolitan Diary: ‘It Was the Start of a Frosty Relationship.’”)  Here’s what I learned:]

In the book Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best by Neal Bascomb (Mariner Books, 2020), the author recounts how French driver René Dreyfus and American heiress Lucy Schell's team (Écurie Bleue), driving a French-made Delahaye 145, beat the Nazi-backed German Silver Arrows (Silberpfeile) teams, whose drivers included the legendary Rudolf Caracciola, driving Mercedes-Benzes, in the 1938 Pau Grand Prix in a town of 78,600 in southern France, 31 miles (50 kilometers) from Spain.

(Écurie literally means ‘stable,’ referring to horses, and it can also refer to a ‘team’ of horses.  In motorsport, however, it can mean ‘team’; Écurie Bleue would be Team Blue.  In other instances of a sports or work team, the correct French word would be équipe.)

This victory was a significant morale boost for the French and a symbolic blow to the Nazis’ claims of Aryan supremacy, reportedly leading Hitler’s regime to attempt to erase all records of the race after their invasion of France in 1940.

René Albert Dreyfus (1905-93), according to Rodney Walkerley, a British reporter who covered motor sports, had “The Look—a stare of searing intensity and undying affection that lets you know, without a doubt, Dreyfus was put on Earth to drive cars fast” (exact source unknown).  Nick Donofrio, the New York Times researcher for Special Projects who reviewed Bascomb’s book, called him “a Max Baer of the asphalt, Jesse Owens on wheels” (“The Need for Speed,” New York Times Book Review 31 May 2020).  

(Walkerley (1905-82) wrote for Motor Sport from 1927 and The Light Car from 1930.  He also wrote several books, including Grand Prix 1934-1939 [1950] and Moments That Made Racing History [1959].)

A nearly fatal accident, and the loss of several friends on the circuit, destroyed Dreyffus’s confidence.  The crash, often cited as nearly ending his career, occurred on 14 April during the 1932 Grand Prix of Comminges in a privately-owned Bugatti.  Dreyfus hit a patch of road where another driver had just crashed in a downpour.  His car skidded, hit a tree, became airborne, and flipped, throwing him onto the road.  He was hospitalized with a severely injured shoulder and various cuts, but recovered to eventually join the Bugatti factory team.

Then, with the rise of fascism in Europe—Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), Duce of the Fascist Party, was appointed prime minister of Italy in 1922; António Salazar (1889-1970) became prime minister of Portugal, a quasi-fascist dictatorship, in 1932; Hitler (1889-1945), Führer of the Nazi Party, was elected chancellor [prime minister] of Germany in 1933; Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Caudillo of the Falangist Party, became prime minister of Spain in 1936—he was banned from competing with the best teams and the fastest cars—Maserati, Alfa Romeo, and Mercedes—because he was Jewish.  An unlikely partnership with an American race enthusiast and a floundering French auto manufacturer would see his faith in himself return. To beat the Hitler-supported Silver Arrows, however, Dreyfus would have to find reason, and purpose, to risk everything.  It’s a story of faith and redemption, set on the perilous stage of motorsport with a backdrop of Nazi arrogance.

Born in Paris, the only child of an American industrialist, Lucy O’Reilly Schell (1896-1952) could have spent her life in the luxury which the wealth of her family made possible.  Instead, she volunteered to be a nurse during World War I, and when peace broke, she turned to racing cars.  A skilled driver, she broke with convention to become a top Monte Carlo Rally driver.  

Hitler’s Silver Arrows (so-named for their burnished-aluminum bodies) on the rise, she sought a new challenge, namely toppling the Nazis from their perch atop motor racing.  She started her own Grand Prix team—the first, and only, woman to do so—then financed with her inherited millions the construction of a formula car from scratch.  She chose a down-on-its-luck French firm named Delahaye to build her car and selected René Dreyfus to be her champion.

After ascending to power, Adolf Hitler declared that Germany would soon reign supreme in Grand Prix motor racing.  Success there would prove the might and prowess of the Third Reich—and help spur the “cavalry of the future.”  This Third Reich propaganda phrase was a reference to the National Socialist Motor Corps (Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrkorps, or NSKK). 

The NSKK was a paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party, conceived to train a host of men in driving and motoring skills, establishing the foundation of a mechanized army.  The organization was very effective in providing manpower for the Wehrmacht’s motorized infantry divisions.  

Hitler envisioned the NSKK units, mounted on motorcycles and in motor vehicles, as a highly mobile, spearhead force, ideal for reconnaissance and fast deployment, fulfilling the traditional light cavalry missions of scouting and quickly positioning troops, but with the speed and technology of motorization rather than horses.  Tanks and other armored vehicles were already fulfilling the traditional heavy cavalry role of shock troops.

Toward this end, the German war machine spurred—and subsidized—the German automotive industry to develop and manufacture the highest quality vehicles possible, and domination of motorsport was the first test of that capacity.  Also integral in Hitler’s plan for a “motorized Germany” was building a nationwide highway system (the Autobahns) and putting every German family in its own automobile (the Volkswagen, or “People’s Car).

To accomplish this scheme, the Führer funneled millions to Daimler-Benz and Auto Union, the two lead auto manufacturers, who then recruited their country’s best drivers to the task of victory.  Foremost among them was Remagen-born Otto Wilhelm Rudolf Caracciola (1901-59).  

Although an unflappable race driver, Caracciola had a killer instinct that had made him the top racer in the world.  Matched with the Silver Arrow race cars built by Mercedes, he was all but unstoppable year after year, winning three European championships between 1935 and 1938.  He became the standard-bearer of Nazi dominance of the Grand Prix, raising his arm in a Nazi salute after each win and featuring in Reich propaganda that labeled its drivers, “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, strong as Krupp steel.”  He was the perfect rival for René Dreyfus.

They were the unlikeliest of heroes. René Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teams—and fastest cars—by the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage.  Charles Weiffenbach (1870-1959), head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye (1894-1954), was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink.  And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, whose fortune came from the construction business and subsequent industrial investments, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days.  ($1 million in 1938 would be worth $23 million today.

As Nazi Germany, with its obsession with fast cars and Hitler’s plans to motorize Germany’s civilian population as well as its Wehrmacht, launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix.  Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day—but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

Bringing to life this glamorous era and the sport that defined it, Faster chronicles one of the most inspiring, death-defying upsets of all time: a symbolic blow against the Nazis during one of history’s darkest hours.  In the opening race of the 1938 season on 10 April—the Anschluß, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, had been just 25 days earlier, on 12 March—Dreyfus drove the Delahaye to a shocking upset of Caracciola and Mercedes in the Pau Grand Prix. 

The race (as recorded on The Golden Era of Grand Prix Racing)

[Rudi] Caracciola took the lead of the race followed by [René] Dreyfus, [Maurice] Trintignant [French; 1917-2005], [Dioscoride] Lanza [Italian; 1898-1977], [Gianfranco] Comotti [Italian; 1906-63], “Raph” [Georges Raphaël Béthenod de Montbressieux (Argentinian; 1910-94)] and Matra [Yves “Yves-Marie” Martin (French; 1911-84)].  On the twisty Pau street track Dreyfus was able to keep pace with the leader and actually pass.  Caracciola re-passed but by now the Mercedes team must have known what would happen.  The fuel consumption of the Delahaye was about half of that of the supercharged Mercedes cars and the track had become slippery from oil and rubber making it impossible for Caracciola to use the power advantage of the Mercedes-Benz.  With half of the race gone Caracciola came into the pits for fuel.  The braking and gear changing on the Pau track had got Caracciola's old leg injury to make itself known and he gave over the car to [Hermann] Lang [German; 1909-87].  Dreyfus took over the lead never to be challenged again as he was running on a nonstop strategy.  Lang’s car developed plug trouble but it is unlikely that the Mercedes team would have won that day even with a healthy car.  The team had to admit that they had been beaten squarely and fairly.  So Dreyfus went on to a sensational victory, taking the flag almost 2 minutes in front of Lang.  Comotti was third in the other Delahaye followed by “Raph”’s Maserati.

(Caracciola had suffered a life-altering leg injury during a practice run for the 1933 Monaco Grand Prix.  Driving an Alfa Romeo for his own privately owned team and car [i.e., not an official, factory-backed team], a brake failure caused him to crash violently into a stone wall at a turn.  The crash resulted in multiple fractures to his right thigh and hip, and he spent six months in a plaster cast from the waist down and was confined to a wheelchair.  His doctors initially told him he’d never race again. 

(Despite the disability, Caracciola returned to win three European Championships (1935, 1937, 1938).  However, the old injury continued to plague him.  His right leg healed roughly two inches (five centimeters) shorter than his left, leaving him with a lifelong limp.  At Pau, the physical toll of braking and gear changing on his weakened leg forced him to hand over his car to a teammate.)

That year, Dreyfus was named the Race Champion of France.

Dreyfus had won the Grand Prix of Monaco in 1930; from 1925 to 1950, he’d become an international race driver of such excellence that he was awarded the Legion of Honor by President Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; President of the French Republic: 1959-69) in the early 1960’s. 

In 1940, Dreyfus came to the United States on special leave from the French Army, which he’d joined as a truck driver when the war started, to drive for France in the Indianapolis 500.  He placed 10th in the race.  He didn’t return to France after the race, joined the U.S. Army in 1942, after Germany invaded France two years earlier, serving as an interrogator in the Italian campaign.  He later brought his family to the United States and became a citizen in 1945, after World War II.

He founded Le Chanteclair at 18 East 49th Street off Madison Avenue (Manhattan’s Midtown East) in 1952 and for 25 years was one of the more popular dining locales for international auto racers.  The restaurant had the ambience of urban sophistication combined with the warmth of a French country inn.  

Dreyfus and his brother Maurice (1904-94), who ran the front of the house, were known for greeting patrons warmly and remembering their names, making everyone feel like an old friend.  The restaurant served classic and haute French cuisine and was well-regarded for its traditional French repertoire and extensive wine cellar. 

Le Chanteclair closed in the mid-1970s.  René Dreyfus, who was born in Nice, died at 88 of an aortic aneurysm at New York Hospital in Manhattan.  In 1983, he published a memoir, My Two Lives: Race Driver to Restaurateur by René Dreyfus and Beverly R. Kimes (Aztex Corp).

More on Censorship of School Theater

[In “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023), I wrote:

The First Amendment to our Constitution—Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .—is supposed to protect artistic expression.  It’s significant, though, that the First Amendment constrains only government action—federal, state, and local—not private conduct.  State-supported (that is, ‘public’) schools, whether primary and secondary schools or state colleges and universities, are arms of the government, however. . . .

As I declared on Rick On Theater back in 2010 in ”The First Amendment & The Arts,” I’m fundamentally a First Amendment absolutist.  In that post, I quoted one of my favorite theater lines, from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s Tony-winning (Best Musical) 1969 Broadway musical, 1776.  

The character Stephen Hopkins (1707-85), delegate from Rhode Island to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence, declares, when asked for his vote for or against an open debate on independence:

Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . .!

That’s exactly how I feel about free speech.  In this democracy, we shouldn’t be constrained from talking about anything.  That includes ideas other people don’t like.  

The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech.  Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: 1916-39) wrote that in 1927 (Whitney v. California).  You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying; you debate them.  (It’s known as “The Counterspeech Doctrine.”)

[These words couldn’t be more appropriate to preface the post below, two-and-a-half years later.  In the time since I first blogged on this topic, I reiterated my support for freedom of speech and artistic expression in posts including:

   •   “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)•
•   “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)
•   “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)
•   “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)
•   “Culture War” (6 February 2014)
•   “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)
•   “‘How to Free Speech’” by Lee C. Bollinger (23 November 2015)
•   “Fighting for Free Expression” (5 February 2016)
•   “‘Arts and the State’” [1990] by Paul Mattick, Jr. (14 November 2021)
•   “Censorship on School Stages” (30 July 2023)
•   “‘The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship’” by Allison Considine, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith (21 April 2024)
•   “America’s Culture War—Now at Your Local Theater” (25 October 2024)
•   “‘The Arts and the Battle for the Soul of Civilization’” by Dr. Indira Etwaroo (4 May 2025)
•   “Degrading the Arts (Redux)” (14 May 2025)
•   “Pentagon Bans Books from Base Schools” (11 November 2025).   

[In The Life of the Theatre, Judith Malina (1926-2015) of the Living Theatre asserted that her husband and partner Julian Beck defined an artist as “a maker of maps” who “will draw up the map for the liberation of dreams: the transformation of ideas into working acts.”

[“The work of the artist,” Beck (1925-85) wrote, is “as the creative of solutions thru [sic] the exercise of the imagination.”  He further declared, “An actor who brings back from his adventures a moment of communicable penetration is a hero, the light of our lives.”

[Artists see the future long before any scientist or engineer can invent it.  Da Vinci saw flying machines half a millennium before the bothers Wright made history at Kitty Hawk; Cyrano de Bergerac envisioned men on the moon three centuries before any Apollo spacecraft was launched; Jules Verne put Captain Nemo in a submarine decades before a real one was built.  As Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus of Athens put it:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i)

[“Things unknown” are often also “things uncomprehended.” “Things uncomprehended” are often “things unwelcome.” It is the artist who is usually at the forefront of efforts to acquaint us with and explain these “things,” often whether we want to hear about them or not.  Silencing artists is an act of willful blindness.  We do it at our own peril.]

“[REDACTED] ROUNDTABLE”
by Robert Schenkkan 

[Playwright Robert Schenkkan’s transcript of this roundtable appeared in The Dramatist Vol. 27 No. 4 (Autumn 2025): “Courage.”  The Dramatist is the quarterly journal of the Dramatists Guild of America.  The discussion transcribed below was posted on the website of the Dramatists Guild on 1 September 2025.]

This roundtable discussion with Jereme Anglin, Brent Lindsay, Dean Jahnsen, and Leila Paine was moderated by Robert Schenkkan.

The DLDF [Dramatists Legal Defense Fund] Defender Award, presented annually at the Dramatists Guild Awards [6 May 2024, presented at Sony Hall in New York City (West 46th Street, near Times Square)], is given in recognition of an individual, group, or organization’s efforts in support of free expression in the dramatic arts. For its 2024 award, the DLDF board named the students at Santa Rosa High School’s ArtQuest Theatre, who led a fight against the school’s attempt to shut down their production of Dog Sees God and then helped create a new theatrical work, [REDACTED], to comment on their experience; their drama teacher, Jereme Anglin; Brent Lindsay, artistic director of The Imaginists, who helped the students create [REDACTED]; and the Mercury Theater of Petaluma [22 miles south of Santa Rosa], for providing a new home for Dog Sees God after performances were suspended at the high school. On July 20, DLDF board member and Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan met with students Leila Paine and Dean Jahnsen, as well as Jereme and Brent, to discuss their experience.

[Santa Rosa High is in Santa Rosa, California. With a population as of the 2020 census of a little under 180,000, Santa Rosa’s the seat of Sonoma County, in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. SRHS, founded in 1874, has a student body of just over 1,600.

[The ArtQuest program at SRHS was launched in 1994 to “provide an above and beyond experience for students who wish to concentrate on the [visual and performing] arts during their high school years and for whom creativity and artistic expression is of paramount importance.” It provides students with the skills to pursue conservatory, college, and professional paths.

[The Imaginists, a theater collective that has been part of Santa Rosa’s culture scene since 2002, is, according to its website, “an artist-run performing arts organization that explores the intersection of art and community, honoring the power of live performance as a vital space for questioning, dialogue, and invention. From original new works to community-based projects, education initiatives, site-specific works, and international collaborations, the Imaginists up-end convention, re-imagine public space, and cultivate radical inclusion as they continually re-think theater: who participates, where it happens, and what it is.”

[Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead is a 2004 written by Bert V. Royal. It’s an “unauthorized continuation” play that reimagines characters from the Charles M. Schulz comic strip Peanuts as degenerate teenagers. (It’s unauthorized and unapproved by the Schulz estate or United Features Syndicate.) Substance abuse, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion, sexual relations and identity are among the issues covered in this parody.

[Dog Sees God was first presented in a reading on 3 May 2004 at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It had its world premiere at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival (13-29 August 2024). It was presented Off-Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse (in the Hudson Square section on western SoHo) from 13 August to 19 September 2004, produced by Sorrel Tomilinson/File 14 Productions.

[The play received its Off-Broadway premiere at the Century Center for the Performing Arts, running from 15 December 2005-20 February 2006. The production was directed by Trip Cullman; the set design was by David Korins; the costume design was by Jenny Mannis; the lighting design was by Brian MacDevitt; the sound design was by Darron L. West.

[Later productions were mounted in Los Angeles (2008 and 2024 for the play’s 20th anniversary); Manchester, U.K. (2009); and Toronto, Canada (2009), among other places.]

Jereme Anglin: My name is Jereme Anglin. I’m the theatre teacher at ArtQuest at Santa Rosa High School. Dean and Leila are my students, and Brent is a guest artist that we bring in every year to work with our students.

Brent Lindsay: I’m Brent Lindsay, and I work with the local theatre company here called The Imaginists. Every year, I go to ArtQuest, and we devise an original work together. 

Leila Paine: I’m Leila Paine. I just graduated from ArtQuest, and I was the vice president last year. 

Dean Jahnsen: I’m Dean Jahnsen. I just graduated from ArtQuest Theatre, and I was the president last year.

Robert Schenkkan: I’m Robert Schenkkan, Council member of the Dramatists Guild Council and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund. I’d like you to set the stage for this story. November 2024. ArtQuest theatre program at Santa Rosa High School is performing a play and there is some controversy.

Dean Jahnsen: Yes. The play is called Dog Sees God [by Bert V. Royal]. It’s a spinoff to the Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, and it’s basically about them growing up and going through life as teenagers. The play was written in 2004, so it had a lot of pop culture moments from then, and it has a lot of drug use in it, and it uses certain slurs that are not accepted today.

Leila Paine: There are a lot of difficult topics that happen during high school. A lot of stuff with mental health, including suicide, drug use, alcohol abuse, things like that, and just overall bullying.

Robert Schenkkan: Leila, Dean, how was it you came to be doing this play?

Dean Jahnsen: At the beginning of last school year, Mr. Anglin brought four plays for us to choose from, and we gravitated toward two plays. Both of them had very real topics—the other one talked about sexual assault. Our entire class decided on Dog Sees God together. 

Leila Paine: We read the scripts for all four plays, and I think it was a week that we took discussing which one we wanted to do.

Robert Schenkkan: Sounds like the students are super involved at this theatre program.

Jereme Anglin: When the students began as freshmen, the content that they’re given is really selected by the teachers. Same thing as their sophomore year. They’re required to do some Shakespeare, some comedy of manners, and different topics that the teachers choose. But in their advanced years, I like to treat them like they’re a burgeoning theatre company. Students then take on leadership roles and have a say in what content they want to do. When they’re producing their shows, they oversee the budget and all that, so they really learn how to work as a theatre company.

Robert Schenkkan: Fantastic. Would you say there was anything unusual about the selection of this particular play for ArtsQuest?

Leila Paine: I feel like it was the usual. Honestly, it was more entertaining than other shows that we’ve done there.

Dean Jahnsen: Yeah. It just felt like another play.

Leila Paine: In level three, it’s a lot more college level material, but it’s also stuff that we enjoy and find important. That was why we chose Dog Sees God over the other shows, because we really connected with the topics that were in it, and we thought it was important to do, especially in a high school.

Dean Jahnsen: It really felt relevant to the times, and it was true to the high school experience.

Jereme Anglin: We’ve done The Laramie Project [(2000 verbatim play – blog ed.) by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project] in that class. The Wolves [(2016 play – blog ed.) by Sarah DeLappe], She Kills Monsters [(2011 comedy-drama – blog ed.) by Qui Nguyen] . . . so Dog Sees God didn’t stand out to anyone as particularly provocative. [A different instance of the suppression of Nguyen’s play is recounted in “Censorship on School Stages,” referenced above.]

Robert Schenkkan: Which brings us to this rather extraordinary moment where suddenly the play is canceled. Were you informed whose decision this was, and what were the reasons given for the cancellation?

Jereme Anglin: We did our first performance on Thursday night [14 November 2024], and then Friday, before I had a chance to meet with the students again, I was pulled into the principal’s office, and there was someone from the superintendent’s office there who said that there had been one anonymous complaint from someone who was in the audience the night before, and that we were gonna need to cancel the play. 

Robert Schenkkan: Had this ever happened before in the history of your program?

Jereme Anglin: Not in recent times. I heard that in the ’80s they were performing Cabaret, and Cabaret was forced to close because of antisemitism, but it’s really unusual, I think. 

[Cabaret, the 1966 musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Joe Masteroff, was set in 1929-30, on the eve of the declaration of the Third Reich. (Adolf Hitler [1889-1945; Führer (leader) of the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party] was elected Chancellor [prime minister] of Germany on 30 January 1933.) The antisemitism in the musical was confined to the characters who were Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers—which was part of the point of the play and it sources, the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

[The play has garnered numerous awards, including the 1967 Tony for Best Musical, 1967 New York Drama Critics’ Circle and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Besst Musical, 1998 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, 1998 Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Revival, 1998 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, 2022 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival, and many nominations.]

Robert Schenkkan: The complaint was anonymous.

Jereme Anglin: Yeah.

Robert Schenkkan: Were you ever given any more explanation of who voiced this complaint or what specifically they were upset about?

Dean Jahnsen: I believe the first time it was because of the language that was used, and then the other time it was sexual innuendos onstage.

Leila Paine: They kept changing it in every email or talk that we had with them. It was always something different. It’s like they couldn’t agree on one reason why it was canceled.

Jereme Anglin: I have a suspicion that the initial reaction was the vocabulary, the language, the slurs, and some of that content. But after the backlash from the community and all the support we got, I think the district then consulted with their legal team and found that the reasons they canceled the play were not actually something they could do. I think they slowly pivoted toward “protecting the audience members” versus, “is this something appropriate for our students to present?” Someone in the audience could sue the school because they were exposed to something they were not prepared for. And that could pose a legal threat somehow to the school district, if a student could say that they learned about something or were forced to confront something that they weren’t ready to do. 

Robert Schenkkan: Do you typically have content warnings on your play programs and on the publicity surrounding your productions?

Dean Jahnsen: In our morning announcements, we do content warnings. We have one outside the theatre and inside the theatre, and then also in our [preshow] speech. We started doing it on social media as well. 

Robert Schenkkan: So, suddenly, they’ve shut you down. How did you all respond?

Jereme Anglin: When I first found out, I was a little stunned and not sure what to do, but I just sat the class down in a circle and let them know what I had been informed of. At first, they thought I was joking, and then when they realized I was serious, they got upset. People were angry. Some were crying, but they quickly became motivated, and I’ll let them tell you what they did. They’re the ones who did it. 

Dean Jahnsen: I sat there, and I was like, “You’re lying,” and then I cried a little bit, and then I went outside, and I talked to my mom, just because I needed comfort. I noticed that, everywhere I looked, they were sad or they were angry. A group of students left the classroom and went around the school to talk to other teachers on what to do. I thought to contact our local newspaper, The Press Democrat [daily paper of Santa Rosa]. One of our fellow classmates contacted one of the editors. 

Robert Schenkkan: So, you went right to the press! That’s fascinating. And Leila, I gather that pretty quickly, you also pivoted to another production venue. Can you talk me through that?

Leila Paine: Right after it happened, we realized that we still wanted to try and find a way to put [the show] on. The class had all agreed—especially because the show was double cast, and because there was only one performance, only half of the class got to do the show. 

Dean Jahnsen: The cast was split up—the level three class is juniors and seniors, and the cast that went was mostly juniors, so the senior class didn’t get to perform at all. So, that was also devastating, because there isn’t a next year.

Leila Paine: My mom is involved in the theatre community in our town, and I was working at a theatre, so I was messaging her and my boss at the theatre company I work at. Mr. Anglin and the other theatre teacher at our school, Miss Cain, were contacting everyone we knew that had venues. Our treasurer has a connection at another theatre company and was contacting them, so we were all reaching out to find what place was available as soon as possible.

Jereme Anglin: A lot of theatre companies had something already built on their stage, so we were looking for an empty space that we could just jump into, and [we] finally found one in the neighboring town, Petaluma. A little theatre company called Mercury Theater said that they had space, and we could go down there and set up. So, the next morning, we all met at the high school, loaded up our vehicles, and spent the entire day at the theatre. I was rebuilding the set and setting things up while the students took over restaging it themselves on the stage. We were multitasking to try to and get it open that same night.

Robert Schenkkan: The students restaged the play themselves. Is that an unusual activity for them? Typically, would you be doing the staging?

Dean Jahnsen: The students will stage it, and then Mr. Anglin will review it and make sure it works for every perspective in the audience. But at that point, we didn’t have time [for that]. But we did it, and honestly, I think the staging was better than it was before.

Robert Schenkkan: It’s so interesting how you took this moment for grief, and rage, and confusion, and then you very, very quickly pivoted to action. So, you have found another theatre, the Mercury Theater. You moved in. You’ve restaged the play, and you did a single performance there, two performances?

Dean Jahnsen: We did two: one earlier in the evening and one later. It was, like, an eighteen-hour day, nonstop. It was crazy.

[The SRHS students did their two Petaluma performances on Saturday, 16 November 2024. The small Mercury Theatre, provided by the resident troupe free of charge, was sold out for both shows, totaling an audience of 240 theatergoers and raising $3,500 for the ArtQuest program. All box-office receipts went to ArtQuest. Outside the theater was a hand-lettered sign that read: “censorship kills creativity.”]

Leila Paine: Then we got together at one of our classmates’ houses to relax and talk about what was going on, and we all made signs about censorship, and we hung them outside of the theatre where we performed.

Dean Jahnsen: That was the night the article got posted, and our entire community really got involved. We were just reflecting on everyone’s support, and that was the big moment where our class bonded. 

Jereme Anglin: The students were also very active on social media, posting on various platforms, and contacted the playwright, Bert V. Royal. He got on board to support us, so there was a huge avalanche of support and positive things that came out. 

Dean Jahnsen: [There were] theatre departments from all over the Bay Area contacting us, [asking] if we wanted to come to them. It was so overwhelming, but it was so cool to see.

Leila Paine: It felt like it came out of nowhere. Initially, when we got shut down, our entire class felt alone in what had happened. We were like, “There’s nothing we can do about this,” but we found, as we kept pushing and trying harder instead of giving up, that there are lots of people in our community and outside of our community that actually care about what happened. It was strange to see that happen, that it’s not just something small that’s happening to us.

Robert Schenkkan: You were surprised by the response?

Leila Paine:  Yeah.

Dean Jahnsen: Yes.

Robert Schenkkan: This is really extraordinary. And there are lessons here, for artists everywhere, professional and nonprofessional. You did not allow yourselves to be shut down. You did not shrink away in shame. In fact, you stepped up and embraced the issue, embraced the controversy. Publicity became your friend.

As a result, there’s a greater sense of ownership by the students. You have expanded a play which already dealt with serious and potent topics into an examination of censorship and the importance of speaking out against censorship. Extraordinary. But my understanding is you didn’t stop there. After Dog Sees God closed, you traditionally begin a new project with another local theatre company, The Imaginists. What have you previously done with The Imaginists, and how was this collaboration different?

Leila Paine: Well, initially, the process started the same. Every year, Brent comes in, and we usually start [brainstorming] around the same time that we’re rehearsing our fall show. 

We did that in about September/October, and then we’d take a break for a little bit when we’re doing our fall show, but then as soon as the show closes, we jump right into rehearsals for what we’re bringing to Lenaea [High School Theatre Festival]. This year, I think we started a little bit earlier, and we started talking about censorship before everything even happened, how the arts seemed to be almost dying a little bit. That was an idea that we were playing with going into it, and we had a rough draft of the script that Brent had created. After everything with Dog Sees God happened, we jumped straight into making [REDACTED]. 

[According to its own website:

“The Lenaea High School Theatre Festival is an annual three-day celebration of creativity and talent, bringing together high school theatre students from across the West Coast. This dynamic event invites students to perform, receive personalized feedback from professional theatre artists, and explore their craft through hands-on workshops in every corner of the theatre world. 

“Founded in 1956 and inspired by the ancient Greek Lenaea festivals, Lenaea began as an initiative of Sacramento State College (now [California State University,] Sacramento) to nurture and elevate high school theatre programs. Since becoming an independent nonprofit in 2012, Lenaea has found its home at the Harris Center for the Arts at Folsom Lake College.”

[Folsom Lake College (FLC) is a public community college in Folsom, California. It’s part of the California Community Colleges system.

[The Lenaia (preferred spelling; cf. ancient Greek: Λήναια) was an annual Athenian festival with a dramatic competition. It was one of the lesser festivals of Athens and Ionia in ancient Greece. The Lenaia took place in Athens in Gamelion, roughly corresponding to January. Beginning in the second half of the 5th century BCE, plays were performed at the Lenaia festival, whose origins reach back into the pre-classical era, and contests of some sort continued into the 2nd century BCE, though it’s unknown when the festival was finally abandoned.

[The Lenaia festival was in honor of Dionysus Lenaios (“Dionysus of the Wine-Press”; the sobriquet “Lenaios” likely derives from the Greek word lenos, meaning ‘wine-press,’ though another possible origin is from lenai, another name for the Maenads, the female worshippers of Dionysus). Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, theater, and revelry, among other things, was known to the Romans as Bacchus.]

Dean Jahnsen: Every year, it’s a relevant theme of what’s going on in the world, and every year, it always has a message. The year before, when we were juniors, it discussed the toxicities of social media [Dreamletting, 25-26 January 2024], but then this year, I remember talking about Moms for Liberty [political organization founded in 2021 that advocates against school curricula that mention LGBTQ rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination], their censorship and their influence. And this seeped into when we were writing [REDACTED], how people have influence on the school board, how the school board affects our every day.

Brent Lindsay: At one of the first meetings, someone brought up theatre and how it is basically either under attack, or it is not finding its enrollment. The COVID blip is real. We see theatre and other art forms struggling. I think this came up early in the conversation, so it wasn’t necessarily about censorship, but censorship, of course, became a very convenient way for us to “find our villain.”

The early drafts, I was playing with One Thousand and One Nights [presumably the collection of Middle Eastern folktales, often known in English as The Arabian Nights, compiled in the Arabic language from as early as the 8th century CE]. We present this show at the Lenaea Festival [6-8 February 2025], so this was a way for us to take something that was going to celebrate the art form, theatre, but also be a little bit cheeky—a satire about a theatre company going to a festival and the antagonist being Mommies Against the Arts. So, we were taking those components, and it was rather messy in the beginning. Then Dog Sees God happened in the middle of this process, and I must say it wasn’t just the cancellation; it was then these meetings that came thereafter in the next two months where I had to be in the room—from the principal to the district to the superintendent. Every one of these meetings, I was taking mad notes, and the show was changing and evolving. Between Jereme and the students and me, it was like, “We could write all this into the material.” 

So, it wasn’t just becoming satire. It was very close to home, and quite dangerous.

Robert Schenkkan: When you say, “Quite dangerous,” what do you mean?

Brent Lindsay: Well, I mean, because the other side of this story that, as soon as Dog Sees God was canceled and they moved it to the Mercury Theater, I think it was the next day that the school board had received enough pressure that they allowed the play to continue, and at that point, it was already too late. Am I getting that right? 

[The board reversed the cancellation on 16 November 2024, the day the ArtQuest troupe had scheduled and prepared for their off-campus performances.  The reversal of the decision to terminate the production was accompanied by the imposition of new restrictions, including script approval for future presentations and age limits for shows with “adult themes.”]

Dean Jahnsen: Yeah. 

Brent Lindsay: The students and [their] social media blasts, they were ferocious. The testimonials were beautiful. I mean, every screen in our community, especially the theatre community, was just blasted, so it was very easy for us to turn to our school board, the superintendent, the principal, everybody, and say, “What the hell’s going on?” 

I think that that kind of community support created a situation where they found themselves in a place where it was very uncomfortable. They step back, and then they have these meetings with the students, which I gotta say all seemed ridiculous. They wanted to save face. They wanted to play the victim, and they were putting it on these guys as if they were the antagonists, that they were actually on the offense. 

So, what I mean by “dangerous” is we got to take all that information in quite some detail and write it into the script. So, if school board members or superintendents came to see the play, they saw themselves. There was no question, not by name, but they knew exactly who we were talking about. 

Robert Schenkkan: I wish I could say I felt adept at social media. Could you school me for a minute here, Leila and Dean, on your social media work throughout the experience? What was your focus? How was it organized? 

Dean Jahnsen: It started with us calling The Press Democrat, our local paper, and that story being written, and everyone started reposting. And there would be updates on the article because we kept in contact with the writer. People were constantly refreshing and reading what’s happening, and it was just repost after repost. I remember looking at that post and looking at the other ones that The Press Democrat put out, and it had like, 5,000 likes, 20,000 views, where the other ones were like, 30 and twenty. 

Leila Paine: And then some of our classmates posted the email addresses of the administrators who were in charge of what had happened, explaining what the actual issue was from our point of view—like, if you’re against this, please contact these people.

Dean Jahnsen: We used our company’s Instagram and Facebook, and also word of mouth. It just spread like wildfire. 

Robert Schenkkan: Fantastic. So, I gather the new play you created with the Imaginists was kind of a story within a story that reflected what you had actually just lived through. Could you give our audience a quick explanation of the plot of this new play?

Brent Lindsay: I think that it boils down to a class bringing scenes and monologues to a festival, and you’re always doing your pieces for a group of respondents. It can be one respondent looking at the playwright’s submissions, two respondents or three looking at scenes or monologues. So, this play starts with one student before a group of respondents, and all of a sudden, it becomes apparent that one of the respondents is one of these Mommies Against the Arts. 

It’s all about, then, how do we kill the arts by way of killing, literally killing these students? So, it becomes this high satire of the students being at risk of death from Mommies Against the Arts. And, à la One Thousand and One Nights, one student steps forward and says, “I wanna do my scene,” and that becomes a scene within a scene within a scene and keeps them all living until she can get to the final scene, basically surrounding all the Mommies for the Arts and threatening to tear them all apart and beheading them and all that. 

Then all the lights come on. That same student steps forward and says, “Hey, relax. It’s just theatre,” and then it’s a blackout. 

Robert Schenkkan: Wonderful. And I understand you went on to win a bucketload of awards at this statewide festival?

Jereme Anglin: Yeah. That came as a shock. We always bring original work there, because of the nature of our ArtQuest program. Our students have a lot of training, and we tend to do pretty well at the festival. We have, I think, a bit of a reputation and respect from other schools and other programs, but this year, we really were surprised at how much they had heard about what we have been going through and how much they liked the [REDACTED] script. The big award that they gave at the end is called the Bob Smart Award. He’s a theatre teacher who created the Lenaea Festival many, many years ago, and they created this award in his honor, to go to an individual or individuals who have undergone some significant struggle in bringing pieces of theatre to the festival, and so last year, we were given that award.

[Bob Smart (life dates unknown) was a professor at Sacramento State College (now CSU Sacramento) who guided many students into professional theater careers. The original idea for a high school drama festival at Sacramento State was initiated in 1955, but by the next year, Smart became a central figure in its operation and enduring legacy.

[Smart retired from Sacramento State College in 1998 and it’s likely his active participation in the Lenaea High School Theatre Festival ended then. The festival probably initiated the prestigious Bob Smart Spirit of Lenaea High School Theatre Festival Award, its highest honor, at that time as a memorial to Smart.  It recognizes individuals or groups who embody the festival’s values, particularly for things like fighting censorship and promoting the spirit of theater.]

Robert Schenkkan: Congratulations! And finally, as a sort of postscript to this whole extraordinary event, I understand that the superintendent who initially censored this production was fired. Is that correct?

Jereme Anglin: Yes.

Dean Jahnsen: The entire school board has been going through a lot of fire recently because of consolidation efforts, and she was let go at the end of last year.

Jereme Anglin: I think it was after a series of bad decisions, and then the community just feeling that the superintendent didn’t really mesh well with our community, with our program.

Dean Jahnsen: And our beliefs.

Robert Schenkkan: Very clearly not. We live in a very challenging moment right now. The arts are definitely under assault. Censorship is a very real issue. Leila and Dean, as you look back on it now, what are the lessons that you took away from this experience which you think might be meaningful to other artists?

Leila Paine: I think that the biggest thing that came out of it, at least for me, is that instead of being passive and letting it happen and accepting it, we took all the emotions and anger, what we had gone through, and we worked with Brent and turned it into art. Instead of just letting it happen, we took our experiences and made something greater. And then also the fact that, as artists, you’re not alone. There are so many more people out there who support the arts than you think there are. So, just because you have one person telling you, “No,” or a group of people telling you what you’re doing isn’t okay, that it’s not right, [that] doesn’t mean that they’re right, and doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. 

Dean Jahnsen: What I noticed is that I didn’t really see a lot of support from the younger generation when it first happened, but when I got to Lenaea and noticed everyone supporting us, it really showed me that the young generation is out there to support and defend the arts, especially in the political climate we are in. 

Robert Schenkkan: Jereme, Brent, did you have anything you wanted to add to that?

Brent Lindsay: Hearing Leila and Dean talk about it, I’m reminded that when we performed [REDACTED] at the school, when we had school board members, or assistant superintendents, or even the principal or vice principal come and sit and watch that piece, oftentimes what happened at the end is the whole black box would leap to its feet uproariously. And the one person sitting would be that school board member, isolated, alone, and I think it was just as shocking to me to see that story play out, to see how lonely it was to be that person who is trying to achieve some sort of power that was rejected by the community. And I think that that’s where art lives. When art finds its feet and its power, that’s what could happen, and this show, like no other that I’ve done with the students, absolutely reflected that. 

Robert Schenkkan: This is such an inspiring story, and I want to thank you for sharing it with the Guild. And I wish you all the very best in your future endeavors!

Dean Jahnsen: Thank you very much. 

Leila Paine: Thank you so much.

[Santa Rosa High School's ArtQuest Theatre program premièred the original one-act musical entitled [REDACTED], a piece exploring censorship, on 23 and 24 January 2025 in the school’s Black Box Theatre.  The performance featured scenes, songs, and designs created by the students in collaboration with The Imaginists. 

[The one-act play mocked the topic of censorship itself, and featured student monologues, scenes, and songs addressing mature themes such as suicide and sexual assault.  The play touches on canceling plays and burning books and the fictional pro-censorship advocates, Mommies Against the Arts, chanted, “Protecting kiddies is our duty! / We cancel anything that smells a little fruity!”

[The SRHS production of [REDACTED] was performed at the 2025 Lenaea High School Theatre Festival from 6-8 February 2025 at the Harris Center for the Arts at Folsom Lake College in Folsom, California (119 miles east-northeast of Santa Rosa; 23 miles east-northeast of Sacramento).  The SRHS ArtQuest Theatre production of [REDACTED] won several top honors at the theatre festival, including the Bob Smart Spirit of Lenaea Award and the Gold Medal for One-Act Play Production, two of the festival's highest awards, and 12 additional individual and group awards across various categories.

[According to KQED, the National Public Radio outlet in Santa Rosa, Lenaea Festival Board Director Cheena Moslen said upon giving the [REDACTED] company the Spirit Award:

This group refused to be silenced.  They mobilized their community, pushed back against censorship driven by fear, and ultimately staged their production, selling out performances.  But that hurdle seems to be the beginning of a larger issue of silencing and oppression.

My experience with this school reminded me that we are not just performers—we are powerful, and our voices matter.

[(Besides being Board Chairman of Lenaea, Moslen taught secondary-school English and theater for 25 years, performs as a Filipinx American storyteller, and is an educational equity coach.)

[Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer Prize, Tony, WGA, and Humanitas Award winner and three-time Emmy nominated writer.  Author of twenty plays including: All the Way (2012; Broadway: 2014), The Great Society (2014; Broadway: 2019), The Kentucky Cycle (1991; Pulitzer Prize: 1992; Broadway: 1993), Building the Wall (2017; Off-Broadway: 2017), and Old Cock (2024 [world premiere, Porto, Portugal]; U.S. premiere: 2025 [Off-Off-Broadway, New York City]).  Upcoming: ReCON$ruXion at Alabama Shakespeare Festival (April 2026) and Motion/CAPTURE with Lisbon’s Mala Voadora company (workshop in Alentejo, Portugal: February 2026). Member of DG Council, DLDF, Orchard Project, NTC, and New Dramatists Alumnus.

[Jereme Anglin is an actor, director, and educator whose career has taken him from the streets of Paris to the stages of both U.S. coasts.  A proud member of Actors’ Equity Association and a devoted practitioner of the Suzuki Method of actor training, Anglin taught for a decade on the East Coast before joining ArtQuest, where he champions rigorous, imaginative, and physically dynamic performances.

[Brent Lindsay, proud member of the Osage Nation, creates contemporary performances that intentionally upset assumptions and expectations, honoring the power of live performance as a vital community space for reinvention.  Brent is a writer, director, actor, and founding Artistic Director of the Imaginists, a regionally and nationally recognized artist-run theatre based in Santa Rosa, CA. 

[Dean Jahnsen (SRHS Class of ’25) is a freshman at the University of California, Davis, where he’s studying Political Science and Art History.  He’s passionate about protecting artistic freedom and fighting censorship. Dean was president of the ArtQuest Theatre company, where he played a major role as a student activist in defending his program.  He continues to advocate for the arts in the Bay Area. 

[Leila Paine (SRHS Class of ’25) is an incoming freshman at Cornish College of the Arts [since 2025, the arts school of Seattle University, a private Jesuit university in Seattle, Washington] and is majoring in Acting and Original Works.  She was the vice president of ArtQuest Theater at Santa Rosa High School, where she found her passion for the arts.  She plans to continue fighting against censorship and fighting for equality.]

Tom Stoppard Remembered, Part 2

 

[This is the conclusion to my small tribute to Tom Stoppard, the wonderful British playwright who died on 29 November at the age of 88.  If you haven’t read Part 1 of “Tom Stoppard Remembered,” published on  3 December, I recommend that you turn back and do so now before reading Part 2, below.

[This installment consists of just one piece of writing, an autobiographical essay Stoppard wrote in 1999 about his discovery of his Jewish roots, kept hidden from him until he was in his 50’s.  As you’ll read, it had a profound effect on him, and eventually led to his writing his last play, Leopoldstadt, in 2020.]

“TOM STOPPARD: ON TURNING OUT TO BE JEWISH”

["On Turning Out to Be Jewish" is the title of a widely-read autobiographical essay originally written by Tom Stoppard and published in the inaugural September 1999 issue (vol. 1, no. 1) of Tina Brown's Talk magazine (which ceased publication in February 2002).  In the essay, Stoppard recounts his surprise discovery through contact with distant Czech relatives in the mid-1990s that he and his parents were fully Jewish, a fact that had been suppressed by his family after they fled Czechoslovakia during the Nazi era.   

[The playwright’s mother had avoided discussing the family’s Jewish roots, only confirming details after Stoppard began asking more questions following her death at 85 in October 1996.  Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, learned that all four of his grandparents were Jewish and had perished in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Terezín.

[Stoppard describes his prior self-professed “almost willful purblindness” about his heritage and his regret for not questioning his mother further during her lifetime.  He wrote of feeling “no more Jewish than I felt Czech” after the revelation, but the discovery prompted him to reckon with his family's history, which later inspired his play Leopoldstadt, his final work for the stage, which explores Jewish assimilation, loss, and identity.

[I haven’t had time since I put together this tribute to Stoppard to get to a library that might have a paper or microfilm copy of the issue of Talk with the dramatist’s essay, and there’s apparently no online version.  This publication from The Huntington, the program guide and occasional online outlet of the Huntington Theatre Company (Boston, Massachusetts), appears to be a republication of Stoppard’s essay.

[The Huntington’s “Tom Stoppard: On Turning Out to be Jewish” was posted on 11 September 2024, 25 years after the Talk publication.  The essay was republished in support of the Huntington Theatre Company’s staging of Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s last play which was inspired by his discovery of his lost heritage.  The production ran ftrom 12 September to 13 October 2024 and was produced in association with Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (which ran the show from 30 November to 29 December 2024).

[On 22 October 2022, I posted a collection of articles on and reviews of Leopoldstadt on Rick On Theater as “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt.”  On 26 December 2022, I published “Tom Stoppard” by my friend Kirk Woodward, accompanied by a report by Dick Brennan of WCBS-TV, who talked about the play and the playwright with Brandon Uranowitz, the 2023 Tony-winner for the Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play for his work in the Broadway production of Leopoldstadt.]

Here, now – here and now in this room in the only country that is my country and among books in the only language I can remember speaking – the English writer who is myself considers the Czech family Beck in 1908. There are seven of them. Dressed up for the studio photographer: Rudolf and Regina, my maternal grandparents: my future aunties Wilma, Berta, Anny, and Irma: and their little brother Ota in his sailor top. They stare back across 90 years of war and peace and war and peace. This is a photograph we have seen countless times, each time different, the family group who never made it together through the Holocaust. 

My table is covered with old photographs newly acquired from Wilma’s son and from Berta’s grandson. Here are the Beck children again, a few years older, in front of the same backdrop. There is a fifth girl now. The new sister, from her scuffed boots to her clapped-on bonnet, is a heartbreaker. She is pushing palms-down with her clasped hands as though literally holding herself still. She is trying not to smile and not quite succeeding. This is my mother, Martha, in 1914, age three. 

Privately, I always hesitate over the word Holocaust – a headline writer’s word for an act too actual for trope, too vast and monstrous for summation. But until quite recently it didn’t seem to be my place to jib at it. 

When my mother was in her sixties I asked her to write down as much as she could remember about her life before I could remember it for myself. I sent her a leatherbound notebook as an incentive, which was a misjudgment. She sent it back years later, unmarked (“It seems a waste”), and instead filled a few pages in a cheap exercise book. 

The move to England, she wrote, had been so sudden, unplanned, an[d] drastic that I – perhaps subconsciously – decided the only thing to make it possible to live and truly settle down (I mean the three of us [Stoppard seems to be referring to his older brother Petr, who later became Peter]) was to draw a blind over my past life and start so to speak from scratch. Whether this was realistic or possible I don’t know. I mean whether it was the right thing to do. 

Her little memoir does not raise the blind very far. My mother wrote it when she was 70 in 1981, which happened to be the year Ota, the boy in the sailor top, died. There is no mention of this brother, and I did not learn of his existence until later. As to the names or number of her sisters, or what happened to them, the memoir is equally uninformative. She writes about family life before and after her marriage and about my father. She describes her parents and my father’s parents but does not say when or where or how they died. The word Jew or Jewish does not occur. 

~

When I was born, in July 1937 in Zlin, a small town in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, my name was Tomas Straussler – Tomik to my mother and father. We left Czechoslovakia – my parents, my brother Petr, and I – when the German army moved in [16 March 1938]. By the time I understood that there was a connection between these two events I was an English schoolboy, Stoppard Two at prep school (Peter being Stoppard One), Tommy at home. 

[Of the three historical regions of what became Czechoslovakia in 1918 (after World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved), Moravia is the second largest and was in the middle of the newly formed nation. (The other two historical regions are Bohemia and Czech Silesia [so named because parts of Silesia are in Poland and Germany].) As a province, it was named Moravia-Silesia; it now forms the eastern end of the Czech Republic, though it is no longer a province (země or ‘land’). It has a significant German-speaking population.

[Stoppard’s family name at birth was actually Sträussler (pronounced stroy-sler) because they were Czechs of German descent. His father’s given name was Eugen (oy-ghen), the German form of Eugene, not Evžen (ev-zhen), the Czech name.]

So we were Jewish? My mother would give a little frown and go “Tsk!” in her way and say, “Oh, if anyone had a Jewish grandparent at that time . . .” 

I believe I understand her “Tsk!” It was less to do with denial than irritation. To ask the question was to accept the estimation put on it not by her but by the Germans. She had no sense of racial identity and no religious beliefs. Of course there were Jews in Zlin, she said, but they were proper Jews who wore black hats and went to the synagogue and the rest of it, Jews who were Jewish. 

During the last 18 months of her life – I did not know this then – my mother corresponded with a researcher in Zlin, Dr. Emil Máčel [chronicler of Jewish life in Zlín], who was trying to put together the almost forgotten story of the Bata Jews. Zlin was the world headquarters of the Bata shoe company, and my father was a doctor at the company hospital. “In Czechoslovakia,” my mother wrote (in Czech) to Emil, “there were so many mixed marriages that the matter lost importance. In my family the ratio was about 50-50. Three nephews and one niece lived in Bohemia, three generations in a modest Catholic environment.” 

[At the time the Sträusslers lived in Czechoslovakia, Bohemia was the westernmost province (země or ‘land’) of the country. Formerly a sovereign principality, it was the largest and most populous province of Czechoslovakia; the national capital, Prague, was in Bohemia. It has a large and influential German-speaking minority. (In today’s Czech Republic [Czechia], Bohemia is no longer a separate administrative district, but it remains a significant historical region.]

As I understand it, if l do, “being Jewish” didn’t figure in her life until it disrupted it, and then it set her on a course of displacement, chaos, bereavement, and – finally – sanctuary in a foreign country, England, thankful at least that her boys were now safe. Hitler made her Jewish in 1939. By the spring, comfortably before the European war started, all that was behind her, literally: We embarked at Genoa [Italy] for Singapore [a British colony until the Japanese invasion in 1942], in good time for the Japanese onslaught. 

For the Japanese were a different story. They killed my father and did their best to sink the ship that got the rest of us to India, but it wasn’t personal, we weren’t on a list, it was simply the war and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My mother remarried in India in November 1945 and died in Devon in the west of England in October 1996, age 85, of cancer. The last words she spoke – in the front passenger seat of my car when we were taking her to the hospital – were (crossly), “And Tom hasn’t got any sweets!” She persisted in the idea that sweets in the car were a surety against the likelihood of my falling asleep at the wheel on my journeys back to London. I was 59. 

~

My stepfather, formerly Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British army in India, believed with Cecil Rhodes [1853-1902; British mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (roughly half of British South Africa’s land area centered on Cape Town), 1890-96] that to be born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life, and I doubt that even Rhodes, the Empire builder who lent his name to Rhodesia, believed it as utterly as Ken. Ken’s utopia would have been populated by landed gentry, honest yeomen, and Gurkhas [members of the dominant ethnic group in Nepal]. When my mother had just died, the words that came to him were “She was a very gallant lady,” a formulation dating from Kipling’s hill stations and the officers’ mess. He was already ill himself, and he died nine months later, by which time his Raj-nurtured sense of superiority over what [Rudyard] Kipling [1865-1936; English journalist, writer, and poet] called the lesser breeds had long since festered into a bile against Jews, blacks, Irish, Yanks, foreigners in general, and the urban working class. (Homosexuals were hardly mentioned because they were hardly mentionable.) He was an unlikely personality to have married a Czechoslovakian Jewess with two children. But marry her he did, and brought us to England four years to the day after we landed in Bombay. “Don’t you realize,” he once reproached me when, at the age of nine, I innocently referred to my “real father,” “don’t you realize that I made you British?” 

Ken was one of the very few Englishmen my mother had known before she got here, so perhaps it’s not surprising that she thought Peter and I would be given a hard time at school and in English life if we were to start off as foreign Jews. As it turned out she was quite wrong, at least about the schools we went to. 

She herself remained engagingly foreign, keeping her accent and making us plum dumplings powdered with cinnamon and delicious jam-filled buns called buchti that often found their way into the parcels of “tuck” [British slang, mostly among children, for ‘snack food’] she sent to us at school. Her tuck parcels were misshapen triple-wrapped double-trussed Kellogg’s boxes overstuffed with things she thought were good for you, like glucose tablets and dried fruit, to offset the quantity of things that were definitely not. 

She had a third son, Richard, in 1949, and a daughter, Fiona, in 1955. Her concern for the good health of her children on the one hand and of the rest of mankind on the other weighed about equal, even when we were grown up with children of our own. 

When we came to visit, she’d see us off by pushing bags of toffees and homemade rock cakes [small traditional British dried-fruit-filled cake or bun with a rough, uneven surface that resembles a rock] and the occasional scarf, pair of gloves, or piece of crockery at us, at the last moment rushing back into the house for a bag of prunes but alas forgetting the fruitcake, which she would lament when we phoned in to report that we’d survived the journey home.

But for every homemade cake and knickknack she gave out, my mother held back much more, whole histories. 

~

Some things I knew. Auntie Irma had married and gone to live in Argentina well before the war. The two sisters wrote to each other regularly until Irma died in 1995. I remember her. In 1948 or thereabouts, Irma came over to visit us. She and my mother spoke rapid emotional Czech while Peter and I bore up under Irma’s tears and kisses. 

Nor was it any secret that we had family in Czechoslovakia. Letters in Czech, photographs, and Christmas cards were occasionally exchanged, but as time went on the signal died. I was busy being English and seldom thought about these mysterious distant relatives.

One of them, I discovered when I read my mother’s memoir, was my father’s sister: After a while I had the feeling she did not want any letters from here. Her husband became a Judge of the People’s Court, whatever that means, and of course I never wrote again. It was safer not to, as not to embarrass him. 

That was the other thing. Having relatives “in the West” was not good in communist Czechoslovakia. When newspapers began referring to my Czech background, my mother would become cross and fretful. “Why do they harp on about that? It’s got nothing to do with your life now. Can’t you stop them?” 

But there came the day when the communists fell and the blind went up. 

I was in Czechoslovakia, President [Václav] Havel’s Czechoslovakia, for a PEN conference [PEN International, a worldwide association of writers founded to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers]. Returning very late from Pilsen to my hotel in Prague, I found a young man waiting for me in the lobby. I learned later that he had traveled from his home in another town and had been waiting in the lobby for several hours. He had read in a newspaper that I was coming to Prague. It was now about two in the morning. He couldn’t speak much English, and I couldn’t work out what he was trying to tell me. He had an old photograph album that he put on the hotel counter and opened. There was a photograph of me and my brother Peter with the family spaniel in the garden of our first house in England. 

[Havel (1936-2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. He served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. Havel was the first democratically elected president of either country after the fall of communism on 10 December 1989.]

Alexandr, I discovered, was the grandson of my mother’s sister Berta. There were many photographs, including that one of the Beck children in 1914, and – even more astonishing to me – Martha in 1927, age 16, a flapper in beads, slave bracelet, Charleston shoes, and party dress, looking amazingly pretty; and again in 1930, almost glamorous, with carefully plucked eyebrows and a fur-collared coat. The fact that my mother was beautiful had escaped me, and the realization was shocking – and then touching, when I saw that the dress had obviously been run up at home and the coat was a poor girl’s best. She is wearing the coat again in cold weather in 1931, on a park bench with Wilma and Wilma’s sons Jaroslav and Milan near trees and water among the buildings of the Baca hospital. 

By this time, 1994, I knew that my mother had started life with four older sisters and an older brother. I knew their names and I knew how Wilma, Berta, and Anny had died. The person who had told me was the daughter of one of the boys in the photograph on the park bench: Wilma’s granddaughter Sarka. 

The year before, Sarka had written to my mother from Germany, where she now lived, proposing to visit her in Devon, and my mother (I can see it all) had slightly panicked because Ken would not have been receptive to this sort of thing and could not be relied on to behave gracefully. So we met in London, in the restaurant of the National Theatre, where I was working that day: my mother, my sister (half-sister, but I never call her that), my sister’s little girl, and Sarka and I, who was Sarka’s father’s cousin. 

After a while, at one end of a long table cluttered with the remains of the meal, I got into a tête-à-tête with Sarka. She wrote down the family tree of my mother’s generation on a sheet of foolscap [paper of 8 × 13 inches (203 × 330 mm)], which she turned sideways to get them all in. This was the first time, at least in my memory, that my Czech family had been given names and relationships, and I was conscious that my English family, myself not least, must be looking distinctly odd to Sarka. It was a little embarrassing, even shameful, and I immediately made it worse. 

“Sarka, were we Jewish?” 

“What do you mean?” 

I adjusted. 

“I mean, how Jewish were we?” 

“You were Jewish.” 

“Yes, I know we were Jewish, my father’s family . . .” 

“You were completely Jewish.” 

I looked at the family tree. I went left to right. 

“What happened to Wilma?” 

“She died in Auschwitz.” 

“Berta?” 

“Auschwitz.” 

“Anny?” 

“She died in a different camp. I don’t know where.” 

“Ota?” 

“He survived.” 

Irma was dying in Argentina, nearly 90, a widow and childless. Martha, the youngest, was busy with my sister and my niece at the far end of the table. 

My grandparents all died at the hands of the Germans. My father’s parents, Julius and Hildegard Straussler, were part of a “transport” of Moravian Jews taken to Terezin, in Bohemia in northern Czechoslovakia, where they arrived on December 2, 1941. On January 9, 1942, they were among 112 prisoners transported “to the East,” to Riga in Latvia. This is the recorded date of their deaths because it is the last fact known about them. 

[There are two posts on ROT about the Terezin (aka: Theresienstadt) Concentration Camp: “’Performing for Survival – Cultural Life and the Theatre in Terezin‘” by Bahar Akpinar (7 March 2022) and “The Last Cyclist (2 and 5 September 2022). A personal note: both my paternal grandparents were from German Jewish families from Eastern Europe and emigrated to the U.S. as children at the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather was born in the Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire, but my grandmother came from Riga, Latvia (also part of Imperial Russia).]

Rudolf and Regina Beck, my mother’s parents, were also transported to Terezin, and died there, in July and April 1944, while we were in India – Peter and I at school, my mother in charge of the Baca shoeshop in Darjeeling. 

~

From a few paces’ distance, the interior walls of the 15th-century Pinkas Synagogue in Prague seem to shimmer with tracery tight as knitting. But it’s not tracery, it’s names – the nearly 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Nazis. I am here with Sarka and her father, Jaroslav. They have been here before. We three find the names again, the Strausslers and the Becks. Anny, I tell Sarka, died at Riga, on January 9, 1942, as far as anyone knows – the same place and date as my father’s parents. (I’m the one with the information now. A year earlier Peter and I had returned to Zlin for the first time, to meet Dr. Emil Máčel, my source.) Anny was the sister who never married. Wilma, the eldest, and Berta, the next eldest married gentiles, but that had not saved them. 

Jaroslav and I were meeting today for the first time since I was in my pram. Jaroslav was 16 then. He remembered that he took two-year-old Petr for a walk, holding him by the hand. Petr had a runny nose; Jaroslav wiped it for him. After leaving the Pinkas Synagogue, Sarka and Jaroslav took me to the station for the train to Zlin, three or four hours to the southeast. 

On the train with me I had a fold-out gazetteer of “Jewish Monuments in Moravia and Silesia.” Zlin merited only three lines and two items of interest: There was a small Jewish section in one of the cemeteries, and it was the birthplace of the English playwright Tom Stoppard, “in proper name Tomas Straussler (born 1937).” 

~

All my life I have been told that I “take after my mother,” whatever that is supposed to mean, and now it does appear to mean more than a compliment. In August 1968, when the armies of the Warsaw Pact [the Warsaw Treaty Organization, a military alliance of the Soviet Bloc nations to counterbalance NATO, 1955-91] put down the movement for reform in Czechoslovakia [the Prague Spring, 5 January-21 August], my then wife was firstly incredulous and secondly infuriated that I didn’t get worked up about it as a Czech. It was true. I had no special feeling other than the general English one of impotent condemnation, tinged with that complacency one feels when the ogres of one’s personal demonology behave true to form. I knew I was – used to be Czech, but I didn’t feel Czech. That year I had some money for the first time, and I was buying first editions of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh and beginning to collect 19th-century English landscape watercolors in a thatched cottage in a commuter-belt mock-up of rural England. I felt about as English as you could get. 

Even when, in 1977, I made my first return to Czechoslovakia, I felt no identification at all. Everything – the landscape, the architecture – looked interestingly foreign. My purpose was to write about human rights, and I could as well have been in Poland or Hungary. Indeed there was something slightly irritating about the way newspapers then and later would call up to ask for a quote or an article about Czech affairs – of which I usually knew little – as though I were a Czech expert. 

Earlier that year I had been to Moscow and Leningrad on another human rights story, the imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals of Jews who applied for exit visas to Israel [“refuseniks”]. I continued to write about this persecution and sometimes to speak from platforms, finally in 1986 organizing a 24-hour “event” in London, for which I recruited scores of notables (Senator Bill Bradley [b. 1943; American Democratic politician and former professional basketball player; U.S. Senator from New Jersey: 1979-97; unsuccessful candidate for the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination] flew over specially). As a result I received letters thanking me as a Jew, and I remember that once or twice, feeling obscurely that I was receiving credit under false pretenses, I replied that I was not Jewish or at any rate not really Jewish. I had become habituated to the unexamined idea that although – obviously – there was some Jewish blood in me (my father’s father’s?), enough to make me more interesting to myself and to have risked attention from the Nazis, it was not really enough to connect me with the Jews who died in the camps and those who didn’t. 

This almost willful purblindness, a rarely disturbed absence of curiosity combined with an endless willingness not to disturb my mother by questioning her, even after – no, especially after – our meeting with Sarka, comes back to me now in the form of self-reproach, not helped by my current state of mind now that I’m Jewish. I feel no more Jewish than I felt Czech when, 22 years ago, I went to Prague for a week to do my English bit for Charter 77.

[Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. The Charter criticized the government for failing to implement the human rights provisions of a number of international documents it had signed. Despite explicit rejection of “oppositional political activity,” the Charter was declared illegal and the government launched retaliation against its supporters and signatories.] 

Moreover, unlike my attitude toward the Czechness of things, which always had the neutrality of disinterest, I am definitely uneasy with Jewish orthodoxy, which I do not exempt from the general unease I feel with all manifestations of exclusive ritual and heightened religiosity – bleeding Christs, Hindu temples, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etcetera. And another thing. Before I was Jewish my attitude toward Israel teetered between admiration and a disquieting sense that the Palestinians were paying for the Allies’ conscience about what the Germans did – picking up the bill for the Nazis, in fact – and now that I’m Jewish I have the same disquiet. 

My friend Manny Azenberg [Emanuel Azenberg (b. 1934); American theater producer and general manager] in New York has been asking me for years to go with him to Israel. I’ve never had the time (that is, of course, enough interest to make the time) and now I have the odd sense of its being too late. I don’t want to be claimed as if I’ve turned into someone else. This is why I think I understand my mother going “Tsk!” But we shall see. Until a couple of years ago I never had any interest in going back to Zlin. 

~

Zlin, 15.11.97 

Dear Sir, 

When studying the archives of the Bata Company in Zlin I found a personal file of your father Mr. Eugen Straussler M.D. who lost his life in Singapore when his ship was sunk by Japanese bombers in 1942. 

In this file is perhaps the only preserved photograph of your father. I sent your mother a copy of the file. I would like to mention that I exchanged letters with your mother for about two years, but for one year I did not hear from her. In her last letter she wrote she was ill and since then I am without news about further life . . .

My mother had been dead for 13 months when Emil Máčel introduced himself by letter. 

My brother Peter and I went to Zlin to meet Emil in May last year, 59 years after we’d got out. Neither of us had any memory of being there. We found our family home, a brick cube with its own garden, one of scores of similar houses built by Bata in a grid of leafy streets not far from the hospital. My parents moved into it in July 1934, a month after they were married. 

From my mother’s notebook memoir: 

When I left school I took a secretarial course and like everyone else joined the Finn [sic: this is probably an error and should read “the Firm,” referring to the Bata shoe company, a major employer in Zlin]. After I started working, I must have been 18 then, life became less restricted. I started skiing and going to dances (with my mother sitting there). On one ski trip – away day only – and without my mother! – a young doctor from the hospital invited me to a dance there, and that’s where I met your father, who was still studying but working there during vacations. He was one of a group of students from various universities . . . 

I was saving like mad knowing we will be poor to start with. Continental custom is very different. The man does not (or does not have to) provide a thing. In most cases men expect and get a dowry. Money. And to marry a girl without money is heroic. Well, he was and he did . . .

The next five years were blissful. We must have had our ups and downs but as always one only remembers the good times. Just as well. 

Your father was perhaps not handsome in the conventional way, he was very intelligent, had great charm (I was always fighting off the nurses!) and had a first class brain, but was very modest. His integrity was total. Everyone in the hospital liked him – the staff and the patients. I don’t want to sound too fulsome but this is how I remember him and when I die there won’t be anyone left to say what kind of a person he was. What he would have finally achieved one can only guess. He had no intention of going into general practice and was well on the way to becoming a heart and lung specialist. 

In my mind I always knew what my father looked like, and my memory of him is supported by (or perhaps consists in) a few tiny snapshots. The Bara [sic: Bata] archive adds a few dispassionate touches to the portrait. His letter of employment in February 1932 promises him board and lodging at the hospital and 200 crowns per week (there were 140 crowns in an English pound). His personal property was “nil,” his savings were “nil,” his debts were “nil,” the money he had to tide him over till his first payday was “nil.” He had been recruited by the head of the Ba[t]a hospital, Dr. Albert. 

Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, and in September the disputed Czech territory of Sudetenland was ceded to Hitler. On September 19, my mother (who in her memoir wrote I have no recollection of any special holidays and I am sure we did not go abroad) was issued her first passport. 

In February 1939 she received 30 English pounds from the Firm – “Mrs. Straussler is going with her husband, who will stay in Singapore for at least three years.” 

On March 14, the company’s “Social and Health Institute” reported that Dr. Straussler and family were fit for the tropics. 

In April this year [1999, when Stoppard originally wrote this essay], the 96-year-old widow of Dr. Albert, chief of the Bata hospital, receives me in her flat in Prague, with her two daughters, Senta and Zaria. She is telling me what happened on March 14, 1939. Very early in the morning, Dr. Albert got a phone call from the Ba[t]a directorship to tell him that the German army had crossed the frontier. He then got on the phone himself and called the Jewish doctors to his house. “My husband said, ‘You have to get out, right now.’” Bata had factories and offices in many countries, and the Jewish doctors (Emil believes there were 15) were assigned to places where they’d be out of danger. Mrs. Albertova shows me a photograph. “This is the room where they met.” Most of the photograph is occupied by a bookcase, which I realize is also in the room I’m sitting in. Her younger daughter Zaria was only six years old but she remembers the meeting: “Afterward the room was full of smoke.” 

All three remember Dr. Straussler. The two “girls” tell me he was considered the nicest of the young doctors, the one they asked to have when they had measles and other childhood illnesses. “When Dr. Straussler talked to us we knew everything would be all right.” It seems, too, that among Dr. Albert’s young assistant physicians, Dr. Straussler was the highflier, the chief’s favorite. “When there was a problem, my husband would send for him and tell him, ‘You sort it.'” 

When Zaria was very young she put her hand through a glass pane and cut it. Dr. Straussler stitched the cut. Zaria holds out her hand, which still shows the mark. I touch it. In that moment I am surprised by grief, a small catching-up of all the grief I owe. I have nothing that came from my father, nothing he owned or touched, but here is his trace, a small scar.

Your father chose Singapore. It was all marvelous in the beginning. I liked the heat, the exotic fruit, the food, and the local people. You had a perfectly sweet Malayan ayah [South Asian female servant or nanny, usually one working for a European family] who pushed you and Peter around in a double cane pushchair and tried hard to speak Czech to you. She Would say, “Oh, don’t cry!” or “Hurry up – bathtime!” It was her party piece and she loved you both. Later you both went every morning in a rickshaw to a kindergarten. 

We lived in a small house belonging to a Dutch shipping company or KLM, can’t remember. The house was for temporary occupation and we had just started looking at houses nearer the sea when war broke out. Even now I can’t write about it all. We were not panicking and we were together but like for everyone else it was traumatic. By the middle of January, a lot of women and children left because they wanted to but by the end of the month all women and children were evacuated. I stayed as long as I could, specially as I did not want to go on my own to Australia. Hoping that we might all go eventually. It just did not work out and the last few days were chaotic, boats, days, and times always being changed. The journey from Singapore was pretty dreadful. We were bombed just about everywhere. In the harbour, standing three days just off Singapore, then on the way to Australia, then turned back to Singapore and finally to India. 

At the time we were so worried about the men left behind in Singapore we did not really notice or mind anything. Cabins were overcrowded and mattresses on decks preferable. Children were always getting lost (not mine!) but I cried myself silly one night because I lost two silver medallions engraved with your names my best friend gave you. Hung them on a hook in the bathroom instead of putting them into my pocket – will I never learn?

I remember this. I remember the medallions, and the loss, and most of all my mother crying. 

Personally I did not like being in India. The constant worry about your father, what happened, where he was – did he know where we were and mainly did he survive? Nobody had any information although the Red Cross and Czech Consul in Calcutta tried hard for us all. There were columns of notices in the Calcutta papers where people wanted information about missing husbands, wives, even children. 

The four years seem even now like a lifetime and a nightmare. I have no idea how and why I came to Darjeeling. By that time I was feeling rather ill, depressed, and it was all getting too much. Darjeeling was the change I needed. The air was so good and I was busy working and enjoying it. Otherwise it was just a matter of waiting and waiting. Once I was asked to go to Calcutta, only to be told that after all the people were accounted for, your father was amongst those missing, presumed lost, and as they were all listed as civilians, it was all they could do. 

I returned the next day to Darjeeling but did not tell you. Rightly or wrongly. Rightly, I think. You had enough to cope with. 

But one day in Darjeeling a woman friend, at my mother’s request, took Peter and me for a walk and told us that our father was dead. Then she walked us back to the house, where my mother was waiting for us, teary-eyed and anxious about how we had taken it. For my part, I took it well, or not well, depending on how you look at it. I felt almost nothing. I felt the significance of the occasion but not the loss. 

How had my father died? On land? At sea? No one seemed to know. As far as I was told he had simply disappeared. But in fact there were people who did know and at least one of them, a Singapore survivor married to a close friend of my mother, must have told her. So that was something else she preferred not to go into. 

~

In Singapore in one of those Dutch company houses there lived an English family, Leslie and Katherine Smith and their son Tony, who was the same age as my brother Peter. Leslie, today a spry and dapper 90, was the manager of a British company that made optical and navigational instruments. He got in touch with me this year. Our families, he said, had been friends. On Sundays sometimes we would go to the Singapore swimming club together. Katherine Smith and Martha used to have each other in for coffee. When Peter answered the door he would shout, “Mama! Pani [Mrs.] Smithova!” 

Two days before the fall of Singapore: said Leslie, after the women and children had left, my father and another Czech, Mr. Heim, came to his office one evening. They said, ‘Look, we have to get out. Can you help?’ Because of my work, I had a pass to the docks and I knew the ships’ captains. So we got into my car. It was dark. The sentry at the docks let us through. There were several ships but only one of them seemed to have any activity going on. We went on board. I knew the captain and I asked him if he would take these two Czechs. He said yes, he would. Your father tried to persuade me to go with them, but I said I couldn’t leave my staff. So we all shook hands and that was the last I saw of your father.” 

The ship was sunk by the Japanese in the strait between Sumatra and the island of Bangka, trying to make it to Australia. 

~

A few days after my mother died, Ken, whom from England onward I had called “Daddy” or “Father” or “Dad” (though he objected to “Dad,” which he thought was lower-class) wrote to me to say that he had been concerned for some time about my “tribalization ” by which he meant mainly mv association, 10 years earlier, with the cause of Russian Jews, and he asked me to stop using “Stoppard” as my name. I wrote back that this was not practical. 

Leaving aside the anti-Semitism and, frankly, the dottiness, I know what made Major Stoppard, himself the father of two half-Jewish children, so angry. Whatever his opinions about Jews, his prejudice had an obverse side, a paternalism toward other races who were grateful to adopt English ways and modes of thought. Blacks were admirable when they were Anglophile Indians. Gurkhas were especially admirable. But when it came to Jews (or Indians) who to their good fortune received honorary membership in the club but persisted in their “tribal” ways nonetheless – that was sheer ingratitude, an insult to his country. Don’t you realize I made you British? 

Until I went to the bad, and the first sign of that was when I turned out to be arty, I was coming on well as an honorary Englishman. Ken taught me to fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the monarchy. In the end I disappointed him. And yet, did he but know it, it’s all too late, this going back, these photographs, that small scar on Zaria’s hand. They have the power to move, but not to reclaim. I was eight and a half when our ship docked at Southampton on a freezing February day. My feet were so cold I cried. We had to travel halfway up England to Ken’s mother’s house. 

The train journey from Southampton to Retford was nerve-racking to say the least. I hope I wasn’t irritable or cross with you. You could not possibly have known what state I was in! I did not know what to expect at the end of that long journey. As it turned out, it was all very friendly, and Ken’s mother could not have been kinder to us. 

I was still Tommy Straussler, but English was my only language when Ken gave me his name three weeks later, and long before he asked for it back Englishness had won and had lost.