{"id":94362,"date":"2022-04-16T17:05:49","date_gmt":"2022-04-16T15:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=94362"},"modified":"2022-04-08T07:15:31","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T05:15:31","slug":"14-00-71","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=94362","title":{"rendered":"A Charmed British Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>A Charmed British Life<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MARDEAN ISAAC<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Tom Stoppard working in the study of his home in Iver, Buckinghamshire, circa June 1979PATRICK WARD\/POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/em><\/span>.<\/p>\n

\nA recent biography of Tom Stoppard shows the playwright coming to terms with the Jewishness buried beneath his proud English identity<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

.<\/p>\n

\n

“Happiness is \u2026 equilibrium. Shift your weight.\u201d The dots floating in the middle of the first utterance are nebulous, generating uncertainty. The monosyllabic instructions that follow assert balance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Tom Stoppard quoted these lines, over three decades after he had written them, to Hermione Lee in her recent biography,\u00a0Tom Stoppard: A Life<\/em>. Shifting from foot to foot, he told her: \u201cEquilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Tom\u00e1\u0161 Str\u00e4ussler\u2019s early life, however, was a panorama of upheaval. He was born in Zl\u00edn, Czechoslovakia, two years before the Nazi invasion in 1939, to a non-observant Jewish family. Fleeing the Nazis, they ended up in the British colony of Singapore, where the Czech shoe company his father worked for had a factory. His father died, probably while under assault from Japanese forces, while the rest of the family were evacuated to India, where his mother Marta met and abruptly married an English army major on leave. They moved to England when he was eight.<\/span><\/p>\n

At Okeover Hall, a \u201csomewhat decaying\u201d stately house where he went to boarding school, Tom\u00e1s became Tom Stoppard, and put on Englishness \u201clike a coat.\u201d The tumult of the earliest years gave way to vistas of order and continuity. He was teased mildly over his pronunciation (of \u2018s\u2019 and \u2018th\u2019, and his rolling \u2018r\u2019), but although he was foreign, he \u201cdid not know it.\u201d He would later reflect that the England he fell in love with during this time was \u201cin the first place, only a corner of Derbyshire, and in the second place, perishable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ken Stoppard, a \u201cclean-cut Englishman\u201d with a \u201cstrong commitment to King and Country,\u201d taught his adopted son \u201cto fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the monarchy.\u201d (The \u201cslow, pleasurable concentration spent on an English river\u201d was \u201cpart of his induction into Englishness.\u201d) Later on, in \u201cmoments of hostility,\u201d which included xenophobic and antisemitic outbursts, Ken would make sure Stoppard knew how much these moments mattered: \u201cDon\u2019t you realize I made you British?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Her husband\u2019s overbearing manner and \u201coverriding Englishness\u201d entailed Marta leaving her Czech past and language behind, along with her Jewishness. The emotional restraint of English life in their home helped to shed the past. \u201cShe felt that British chauvinism would put us children at a disadvantage among our new peers if much was made of her foreignness,\u201d Stoppard later told critic Kenneth Tynan.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Behind the story of miraculous escape and good fortune, however, was a murky courtship. Having fled Nazism and survived her husband\u2019s death, Marta\u2014then in her mid-thirties, with Tom and his slightly older brother Peter in tow\u2014was rescued from limbo in India by Ken\u2019s assertive pursuit. Ken, who quickly proposed (she married without telling the kids) and urged resettlement in England, represented \u201csafety and control,\u201d in a situation where, as she put it, she had to decide on her own what she thought would be best for her family.<\/span><\/p>\n

The vast majority of Stoppard\u2019s family had been killed in the Holocaust. It is unclear whether Marta knew, at this point, what had happened to them, but she \u201csaid nothing\u201d to Ken about it. (\u201cI wept alone, after the war,\u201d she wrote in a letter many years later.) In England, her new husband called her \u201cBobby,\u201d and was \u201cimplacably uninterested\u201d in her past, including the Jewishness that she would obfuscate. Marta retained her \u201cstrong Czech accent and Czech cooking,\u201d but the family \u201cdid not much communicate its emotions or share confidences.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ken had a bitter temperament, founded in \u201cpoorly rewarded army service\u201d and \u201cclass resentment.\u201d He never abandoned his self-image as a gentleman soldier, represented in martial garb, as the middling sales manager at a machine tool manufacturer after his resettlement. He had a bullying manner and demanded subservience. Stoppard\u2019s mother, on the other hand, was an \u201canxious, compliant, and dependent\u201d figure in the marriage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hermione Lee does not explicitly analyze the question of the direct effect of Ken\u2019s antisemitism on Stoppard\u2019s attitude toward national belonging. But the way Ken leverages the fragility of his stepson\u2019s Britishness against him colors Stoppard\u2019s later gratitude and patriotism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Marta was evasive and deflective when Stoppard and his brother asked if they were Jewish as kids. Her responses often called into question the inherent solidity of Jewishness as a group category (\u201cwell, two of my sisters married Catholics.\u201d) The Str\u00e4usslers inhabited an assimilated context in Czechoslovakia, and she made the argument that she had only been \u2018made Jewish\u2019 by Hitler and the Nazi invasion.<\/span><\/p>\n

By banishing the interregnum of the Holocaust, Marta established continuity between the old and new versions of belonging that had provided\u2014and might still provide\u2014normality. Pointing to the banality of her previous state of assimilation, and the irrelevance of her Jewishness within it, became another way to validate and smooth her children\u2019s entry to a similar status among the majority in Britain. Stoppard only found out with certainty that his family was Jewish\u2014and that the vast majority of them were killed in the Holocaust\u2014in the 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fueled by his extraordinary professional success and a thriving family and social life, Stoppard\u2019s feeling for England, a land of \u201ctolerance, fair play, and autonomous liberty,\u201d blossoms across Lee\u2019s biography. But from his English perch, he would eventually become drawn back to the grand sense of continental drama from which he came, and in which many in the twentieth century were still contained. Jewishness\u2014his link to that world, and its demise\u2014began to lap against the present with increasing intensity as his life went on.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Stoppard held chronic skepticism towards the very premise of biography, and an aversion to intrusion into his personal life and misrepresentation, both literary and political. These sentiments finally gave way to an invitation for Lee, a literary scholar and biographer, to write the book, which Stoppard issued personally at the end of a party he held in 2013. He was mostly cooperative with the process, which involved Lee speaking to a plethora of friends as well as accessing his personal materials, even though at times, she notes, \u201che clearly regretted setting this book in motion.\u201d Upon receiving the draft, his only\u00a0request<\/a>\u00a0was the removal of a reference to an actor who had been fired during a production. This nearly thousand-page tome is a tribute to the security and liberty that allow the recording of (almost) everything.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a mostly happy life, studded with triumph. There are glowing accounts of Stoppard\u2019s magnetism, charm, good looks, thoughtfulness, kindness, sartorial elegance, and industriousness; his excellence as a friend and family man; his awards and knighthood and honorary doctorates and millions in earnings. Cruelty, despair and turmoil are scarce. The complications are on the margins of positive feelings and upward trajectories.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard treats personal duties and their representation in acts of commitment\u2014commemorations, birthdays, funerals\u2014with care, if not solemnity. He is unfussy and unhesitant in acting on behalf of friends at important times. He keeps in touch with Val Lorraine, who was his landlady in Bristol when he was in his twenties, for fifty years; she was one of his great encouragers as an artist in the early days. He goes to see her when she is dying in 2001, and the house remains \u201cfull of his traces.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The engine of his productivity is unfaltering. Living in a shared house in his twenties, too broke to afford a lighter, he \u201ccut the sandpaper off the match packet and glued it to the desk, so he wouldn\u2019t have to put his pen down for a second, and could strike a light as he wrote.\u201d Later, as \u201clord of his estate\u201d at his country house Iver Grove, he was \u201ckindly and benign\u201d around his sons and their friends, but sat writing at the kitchen table into the early hours. The chutzpah of his ambitions, his deep sense of gratitude, his drive to maximize experience\u2014these all feel grounded in a sense of how easily life could be taken away.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard embraces the commercial contract with his audience: \u201cI am as square and traditional, let\u2019s say reactionary, a person as you could hope to meet because I operate on the premise that a theatre\u2019s job is to prevent people from leaving their seats before the entertainment is over.\u201d But there is restless positive energy in terms of what might come from that commercial contract: \u201cWe mustn\u2019t deny audiences the compliment, indeed the satisfaction, of having to keep up,\u201d he tells the cast of\u00a0Rock n\u2019 Roll<\/em>\u00a0in the middle of the play\u2019s run, attempting to eliminate unnecessary hesitations and pauses in dialogue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hermione Lee skillfully identifies the motif of \u2018doubleness\u2019 in Stoppard\u2019s life, and her understanding is especially acute in her treatment of Stoppard\u2019s self-presentation in the various forms he must inhabit. In later reference to him \u201cshedding his protective skin\u201d in his mid-forties, she writes: \u201cIt had taken a long time to shake off the \u2018bottled-up\u2019 legacy of the family and school he had come from. And he continued to be quite in favor of bottling up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lee has a gift for dramatizing moments in Stoppard\u2019s experience by positioning them against the complex presence of his ensemble. Her account of the differing perceptions of an early dinner in which Stoppard does not intervene when Harold Pinter lashes out at his now ex-wife Miriam Stern, for example, is a masterclass in nuanced evocation. His eventual separation from Stern is \u201cgradual, undramatic, and good mannered,\u201d but Lee locates the pain in it, despite their ongoing friendship and elevated civility.<\/span><\/p>\n

And her portryal of the private histories associated with places and homes, such as this elegaic account of Iver Grove\u2014in which he lived with Stern, whose parents maintained Jewish rituals there, for over two decades\u2014is sweeping yet intimate:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe round stone sundial on the wall of the flower garden, with its design of pansies, reading \u2018For Miriam who made this garden 1982,\u2019 was never taken down. But the rare pansies vanished utterly, the murals on the garden walls faded and bleached, the water garden that took so much labour to make fell into disrepair. The big swirling energy of the Stoppard family life moved on, fragmented and reshaped itself elsewhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

Alongside the English sensibility, New York recurs throughout the book, auguring glamour, memorable exchanges, and an ever-expanding community of voices.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead<\/em>, Stoppard\u2019s 1966 breakthrough success as a playwright, ran on Broadway for 420 performances and won Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle awards. On a trip to the city six years earlier, he had been sleeping on couches. In the summer of 1967, though, \u201che was taken up, spoiled and pampered.\u201d He told his parents that he had performed \u201chis Modest Young Englishman act\u201d on television; in general, \u201ceveryone thought him witty, lovable and charming.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s depiction of how the meta-theatrical, structurally playful\u00a0The Real Thing<\/em>\u00a0(1984) was received is bountiful with elation. Peter Shaffer and David Mamet and Leonard Bernstein loved it; Mick Jagger and David Bowie and Princess Margaret came to see it. \u201cIt was one of those nights at the theatre which makes you think about the way you have led your own life,\u201d Lee writes. Producer Manny Azenberg proposed to his girlfriend the day after seeing the play, which had \u201cseemed to make it possible\u201d for him to get over his fear of divorcing again.<\/span><\/p>\n

In New York, his experiences contained echoes of the European and Russian cultural experience from which he and much of his audience had come. (During the\u00a0Rosencrantz<\/em>\u00a0run, he was often assumed to be Jewish; \u201cI don\u2019t know, there must be some Jewish, somewhere,\u201d is one of his replies.)The line of Alexander Herzen in Stoppard\u2019s 2002 play,\u00a0The Coast of Utopia<\/em>, \u201cBeing half Russian and half German, at heart I\u2019m Polish, of course,\u201d got a muted response in London, but in New York, it \u201cseems to be a joke about almost a third of the audience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard had another American adventure in Hollywood. \u201cThere\u2019s a difference between completely wasted time and time which would have been better spent,\u201d he says in relation to screenwriting, a lucrative \u201cdetour\u201d that Stoppard figured out how to mine. Lee charts several convoluted development sagas, the most successful of which was the Oscar-winning\u00a0Shakespeare in Love<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is Steven Spielberg, however, whose relationship with Stoppard represents a certain frontier of the playwright\u2019s journey. Their engagement appears to have contained little of the rich warmth that is palpable in his friendships with Azenberg or Mike Nichols. Despite its relative impersonality, however, Lee\u2019s narration of their work together contains intriguing glimpses into Hollywood in the 1980s and 90s.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Stoppard did a lot of work on\u00a0Always<\/em>, provided uncredited lines for Amblin films like\u00a0Hook<\/em>, wrote dialogue for\u00a0Indiana Jones<\/em>\u00a0and the Last Crusade<\/em>, and re-wrote one scene in\u00a0Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>. He also wrote\u00a0Empire of the Sun<\/em>. More informally, he helped Spielberg choose scripts and was involved in the early development of projects.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spielberg, who was in the habit of using many writers while maintaining separate bilateral engagements with each, was impressed by Stoppard\u2019s bluntness. \u201cIt was unusual for Spielberg to meet a writer who stood up to him,\u201d Lee writes. During work on\u00a0Empire of the Sun<\/em>, Stoppard wanted to \u201cbe faithful to the strangeness and harshness of Ballard,\u201d and mocked the \u201cheavy-handed pathos\u201d of Spielberg\u2019s approach. He sent a note responding mockingly to the schmaltziness of the ending: \u201cWhy don\u2019t we give Jim a little dog at the beginning, and then the dog could show up too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While Stoppard was clear-minded about the discrepancies in their sense of taste, Spielberg found it useful to let him express himself freely and to harvest what he needed from the experience. The director ultimately characterized Stoppard as a \u201cconsistent blessing in disguise,\u201d testament to how the playwright\u2019s interventions were often productively disruptive.<\/span><\/p>\n

During this period, of course, Stoppard was not officially Jewish. But Spielberg was quietly exploring his own instincts in relation to Stoppard\u2019s perspective. In the context of\u00a0Empire of the Sun,<\/em>\u00a0the director \u201cthought that, although they never discussed it, Stoppard might have felt some identification with Ballard\u2019s story, since he too was a \u2018displaced person.\u2019\u201d Later, Spielberg\u2014along with Stoppard\u2019s other American Jewish friends\u2014would describe Stoppard\u2019s discovery of his Jewishness as \u201ca key to his character.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

As an outsider who proudly became an insider, Stoppard celebrated those settled modes of Englishness about which the native English were rarely self-consciously explicit. \u201cEven the most English of his plays,\u201d writes Lee, \u201chave the sense of an outsider at the edge of the English establishment, or an argument about what makes England or Englishness worth having, or a foray into an undiscovered country.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While his instincts were at odds with a culturally ascendant left, they were deeply aligned with the feeling that the West could be positively redefined in light of the negative counterexample provided by Communism. His relationship to right-wing politics, which intensified in the eighties, was less about seeking an identity in conservatism than embracing the political corollary of an English, and to some extent broadly Western, identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard set verbal joust and jest\u2014rooted in the innocence of prep school, and presented in the free associative community of theater\u2014against the malevolent con of ideological oppression. The freedom to fuss over peculiars and particulars, and playfully self-undermining absurdity, was a state of intellectual bliss founded on the continuity and security of Britain.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard often set that sensibility against communism as an ideological system and against the governments that practiced it: \u201cUnpredictable English eccentricity is preferred to an ideology which explains all mutations and tragedies as part of \u2018historical inevitability\u2019,\u201d Lee writes of\u00a0Hapgood\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Dog it Was That Died<\/em>, which reflected Stoppard\u2019s longstanding interest in double agents.<\/span><\/p>\n

Describing the plays, Lee writes: \u201cHowever ruthless, opportunist and grotesque the activities of the western intelligence operative may be, they are working in the interests of a preferable system. Englishness \u2013 here in the shape of public school education, small boys playing rugby, rule-breaking, eccentricity and linguistic richness \u2013 is worth defending.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard\u2019s direct involvement with conservatism as a political movement meant navigating a path through new milieus. He was a member, along with figures including Irving Kristol and Donald Rumsfeld, of The Committee for the Free World, and he co-signed an open letter to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0endorsing the U.S. invasion of Grenada \u201cto restore democracy.\u201d He developed connections with Margaret Thatcher, whom he believed was \u201cwhat the country needed\u201d at the time (although he would later note her \u201cphilistinism and her divisiveness.\u201d) But he \u201cdid not labor the link between Marxism in West and Communism in East.\u201d His focus was the \u201cvictims of \u2018Soviet tyranny\u2019.\u201d There is much diligent work done on their behalf documented here: writing letters, sending money, speaking, petitioning, protesting, and so forth.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Joseph Brodsky wrote, responding to a century marked by great upheavals, \u201cGeography blended with time equals destiny.\u201d Stoppard\u2019s sense of his own status in relation to others, and his commitment to Soviet dissidents in particular, were defined by that perception. His baseline good fortune, he would reiterate, was that his mother \u201cmarried into British democracy.\u201d As Stoppard reached the pinnacles of conventional success, affirming the rationality of assimilation, he would \u201creclaim\u201d the Cecil Rhodes line that \u201cbeing born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life,\u201d quoted so often by his father.<\/span><\/p>\n

The parallel versions of Stoppard\u2019s self that clarified his good fortune were personified by V\u00e1clav Havel. \u201cA playwright whose mother didn\u2019t marry into British democracy has been charged with high treason,\u201d is how he recorded Havel\u2019s 1977 arrest. Their instinctive friendship is one of the most robust described in this book. Encountering the absurdly over-precise invented language \u2018Ptydepe\u2019 in\u00a0The Memorandum<\/em>, designed by Havel to unmask the ambiguity-erasing obsessions of totalitarianism, Stoppard felt like \u201csomebody was writing his play.\u201d Their responses to politics, too, were conditioned by the sense that, as Havel wrote in\u00a0The Power of the Powerless<\/em>, absent totalitarianism and ideological warping, life moves towards \u201cindependent self-constitution\u201d and the \u201cfulfillment of its own freedom.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard\u2019s decision to become a public advocate on behalf of foreign lands and foreigners was strongly opposed by his mother and Ken. \u201cI feel English and love England and have not an iota of feeling transplanted,\u201d he told his mother in 1986, in an unusually strong letter, defending his anti-Soviet activism in response to her palpably anxious complaints (\u201cDon\u2019t make waves.\u201d) \u201cI have no emotional feeling for Europe at all,\u201d he continued, \u201cexcept that I do think Communism is anti-human. I know it intellectually not emotionally.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

In one way, this is a book of forms\u2014family, national identity, manners, positions, honors\u2014and how Stoppard mastered them. In his role as a public figure he drew on the formality of his early years of schooling and instruction from his stepfather. But even as an increasingly decorated figurehead who came to represent a larger Western story, he was unable to find the right way to speak to his mother about the truth of their family.<\/span><\/p>\n

The buried world of the past nonetheless repeatedly resurfaced. From his British remove, Stoppard surveyed the sweep of Central Europe to Russia: \u201cThere is hardly a time in his life, in fact, when he is not writing in some way about Europe and Eastern Europe, exile, journeying, and homelands,\u201d writes Lee.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard\u2019s immersion in the Viennese and Austro-Hungarian tradition led to adaptations of plays by Ference Moln\u00e0r and Arthur Schnitzler, and ultimately, his most recent play\u00a0Leopoldstadt<\/em>. The \u201csophistication, irony, cosmopolitanism, civilized intelligence, worldliness\u201d of that world\u2014and, Lee specifies, \u201cin great part, its Jewishness\u201d\u2014were tremendously natural to him. He was able to inhabit a parallel track of history, in which he could have been a writer in \u201cdirect descent from Joseph Roth or Stefan Zweig.\u201d \u201cI was born in a town you could drive to from Vienna,\u201d he specified to his friend Patrick Marber, who directed\u00a0Leopoldstadt\u00a0<\/em>in London, in a recent conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stoppard pieced together his Jewish history in the early nineties, through a series of conversations with various relatives. (By then unwell, his mother had been speaking to some of the same people for a few years, including the granddaughter of her sister killed in the Holocaust, but under strained conditions: Ken would not welcome her Czech family into their home.) The process was partly about discovery, and partly about confronting and acknowledging the full heft of what had been suppressed all along. His old aversion to questioning her, however, was still present. By the time of her passing in 1996, he had not delved into the details of his growing findings and connections with her, even downplaying his interest. After she died, his own passive participation in the process of suppressing the past became clear to him: ever since his childhood, there had been an element of \u201calmost willful purblindness\u201d on his part.<\/span><\/p>\n

At some level, the formative experiences of school, where he attended Sunday services and \u201cbeing Christian was like being English,\u201d still held sway. A new Jewish identity had not replaced that; he had no feeling of immersion in a new tribe. As soon as his mother died, however, Ken told him to stop using the name Stoppard, his deeply rooted antisemitism having been inflamed by Stoppard\u2019s public support for Soviet Jews. Despite Ken\u2019s attempt at de-Anglicizing his stepson by revoking the \u201chonorary Englishman\u201d status he had bestowed on him, Stoppard was awarded a knighthood in 1997. Ken died that same year.<\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/span>
\nStoppard returned to the Czech Republic in 1998, \u201creturning to his first home for the first time in nearly sixty years.\u201d On a more extensive trip the next year, he was taken to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, which had been reopened after Communism. He saw the names of the Czech victims of the Holocaust \u201cgrouped by their home towns,\u201d including those of his grandparents, aunts, and other family members. While he was in the synagogue, Stoppard was \u201cvery quiet, took notes and did not show his emotions.\u201d Having learned \u201cthe whole story\u201d of his past, and come full circle through his visits, Stoppard reflected on the limitations of the journey. Remains of the past \u201chave the power to move, but not to reclaim. Englishness had won and Czechoslovakia had lost.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the years that followed, in a \u201clate echo of his mother\u2019s own survivor\u2019s guilt,\u201d a sense of \u201cdenial about his own past\u201d crept up. He began to reconsider the \u201ccharmed life\u201d tagline he had fixed to the miraculous origins of his British identity: \u201cHe increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself.\u201d This coincided with changes in his mental landscape: He was having nightmares about the Holocaust, and experiencing the return of \u201cvery early scenes and moments,\u201d as if \u201che were recovering memories which had always been there.\u201d Two decades after dismissing the remains of the past, \u201cwhat had once been obliterated came back to haunt him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

Mardean Isaac<\/strong><\/span><\/a>\u00a0was born in London to Assyrian parents from Iran and Iraq. He studied English at Cambridge University and Syriac Studies at Oxford University. He is currently writing a novel.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Charmed British Life MARDEAN ISAAC Tom Stoppard working in the study of his home in Iver, Buckinghamshire, circa June 1979PATRICK WARD\/POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES. A recent biography of Tom Stoppard shows the playwright coming to terms with the Jewishness buried beneath his proud English identity . “Happiness is \u2026 equilibrium. Shift your weight.\u201d The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94362"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94362"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94380,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94362\/revisions\/94380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}