I just watched Billy Bathgate and it was bananas. I’m obsessed. I saw Leopoldstadt on Broadway in 2022 and the press angle at the time was that Tom Stoppard was finally openly addressing his heritage in his work, and I guess everybody decided to collectively repress their memory of this movie’s existence, Stoppard included. I can kind of understand why, there’s a definite Philip Roth by way of Derbyshire vibe in there, and you either despise Philip Roth for being a pig and a shanda or you get a secret thrill (maybe not-so-secret) out of the Bad Jews, whether they were self-hating or gangsters or maybe self-hating gangsters. Me, I find a spoonful of venom helps the sentimentality go down. And Stoppard actually got dealt a much, much more fucked up hand in life — it was the price he paid to live, to become a converso for the Crown, so to speak. Nathan Fischbein says it best in Leopoldstadt, speaking to Leo, the author addressing a version of himself: “No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”
