I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light . . .

Ihave been thinking continually of that famous opening of a Stephen Spender poem — but my thoughts run to those who are truly great, the artistic giants among us, or recently among us.

Everyone has a personal pantheon. In mine (to name just two) are Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym, whose time on earth overlapped my own, though I didn’t discover them until they were gone. (Most of my favorite living writers are dead.)

This past November, I saw Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, surely one of the great artistic works of our time. You sense this almost immediately; by the end, you know it with astonished conviction. In between, held breath and fallen tears. There you sit, at a matinée among the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (of which, adding in 150 miles of highway, my husband and I are two), while the English playwright himself, 85, is perhaps having a drink and a cigarette in his study in Dorset. He’s here, now, among us.

The play opens in the opulent drawing room of a large, well-to-do Jewish family in fin de siècle Vienna; it ends in the same room, neglected and bare, in 1955, with the remnants of that family. In between: 1938, the year of the Anschluss. These are the Viennese Jews who tragically misunderstood their predicament, or understood it too late, and stayed. (“Tragically” is a poor, pale shred of a word here.)

I am the child and grandchild of Jews who got out of Vienna in the fall of 1938. This is as much a part of who I am as — well, it is who I am. And yet I can honestly say it was Tom Stoppard who most acutely brought this home to me, in 2022. As I sat in the theater on West 48th Street, experiencing (one can’t just call it “seeing”) Leopoldstadt, I was gripped by the knowledge of the incredible good fortune of my existence. It’s owed to two facts: Both sets of my grandparents understood that they had to leave, to get their children out; and on both sides, there were relatives who had emigrated to America years or decades earlier, which meant that the families had American sponsors as required for entry into the U.S.

In Leopoldstadt, members of the extended family believe things will “blow over.” They believe they are as much Viennese as they are Jews, and that the Viennese see it like this, too. Eventually there is some brief talk of obtaining British visas (only two get out this way), but escape becomes impossible. The play allows you to understand how it is that they couldn’t understand, until it was too late. Stoppard’s moral compassion is that of the truly great.

In one of the two most searing scenes of the play, Nazis enter the apartment and terrorize the family. For the audience, the terror is as close as your skin, though of course there is no question of suspense — you’ve read enough history to know what you know. But you didn’t know it like this. After Leopoldstadt, the knowing becomes physical.

I knew the story from my mother, about the Nazis coming to her family’s apartment, telling them to get out. Unlike the family in the play, they were not at all well-to-do, their apartment small. I knew that the three teenage daughters were each sent to stay with different relatives or friends elsewhere in the city while my grandfather completed the paperwork and preparations to leave — the affidavits from the U.S., the visas, the train tickets — but I don’t know where he and my grandmother stayed.

I know nothing of the details of my father’s family’s departure — he never spoke of it. But 32 years after coming to America, Alfred Hornik wrote a brief memoir of one day, when he was 15:

It is March 1938, the day of the Anschluss. In the afternoon, the radio had announced that German troops had crossed the Austrian border and were approaching Vienna, unopposed.
I am in the streets of the city. The sun has set, some streetlights are being lit. An eerie silence has set in. . . . Traffic is sparse, as the Viennese are eating their evening meals. I am about half an hour from home and rush to get there. All of a sudden, a Nazi flag is being hoisted from a window, a giant thick black swastika in a white circle on a red background. It flutters hesitatingly and then straightens out and hangs there peacefully. Another one appears on a hotel balcony and another one is raised above an entrance to an apartment building. Flags begin to appear everywhere, as if upon a secret command. Banners are being hung between windows, proclaiming in big black letters “Wir danken unserer Führer!” (“We thank our Führer!”). . . .
People are streaming out of their houses and joining each other in the streets. . . . Soon the streets are so crowded that it becomes difficult to walk. It has become quite dark, all the streetlights are lit, and the giant shadows of the massed flags are blotting out the shadows of the massed people. Cars, bicycles, motorcycles are appearing in the streets, honking horns, drivers shouting exuberant words. One group on a corner starts shouting the slogan: “Wir danken unserer Führer!” Another one joins in, and soon the entire boulevard resounds with the endlessly repeated “Wir danken unserer Führer!” As the chorus subsides, another group begins to shout “Jude Verrecke! Jude Verrecke!” (“Die, Jew!”) and the new slogan assumes predominance and rolls down the streets and squares with rhythmic ferocity.
Suddenly, a group of brown-shirted young people, with neatly placed swastikas on their left arms, appear marching in the street, singing the Horst Wessel song, . . . proclaim[ing] that “Jewish blood will spill from our knives.”
Wherever I look, there are untold masses of people, flags, and banners. I have gone through the central part of the city, toward adjoining districts, but the scene is the same everywhere. I am approaching home and the roar continues and will continue through eternity.
Vienna, city of Strauss and Schubert, of Gemütlichkeit and hospitality . . . Vienna, gateway of Europe.

In the devastating final scene of Leopoldstadt, the three surviving members of the family meet in the old apartment. One has grown up in Britain, barely conscious (or having suppressed consciousness) of his and his family’s past, of his and their Jewishness (this is the character who evokes Stoppard’s real-life story). One emigrated to New York before the war. One survived Auschwitz. The latter two, realizing how much their young British cousin doesn’t (or has refused to) know, recite a litany of the dead and where they died. Pairs of words: name and “Auschwitz,” over and over. The only variation is “Dachau” or “Death march. Nowhere.”

My mother’s family, having traveled by train to France and crossed over to England, sailed from Southampton on a Dutch vessel, the RMS Volendam, to New York. Her father risked everything by bringing, along with their allowed luggage, his typewriter, a verboten item.

At 13, my mother was moved by some impulse — a sense of wonderment, maybe, that she had left behind the place she hated and was now on her way to America — to save the ship’s menu as a memento. I have the pleasingly designed sheet, illustrated with a scene of a horse-drawn sleigh in the snow, framed on my kitchen wall. It’s dated November 5, 1938, four days before Kristallnacht.

My father’s father saved his Deutsches Reich passport, which I now have. Before he put it away, in a box or a drawer in the apartment in New York where the family’s new life began, he cut out the top part of the first page. What he removed was the Nazis’ red “J.”