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Stoppard, his
mother, and brother were evacuated to India, and narrowly escaped the sinking
of their ship by the Japanese. In
India, Stoppard attended an American-run, English-speaking school until his
mother’s marriage to British officer Kenneth Stoppard prompted the family’s
settlement in England, where Stoppard took his stepfather’s name and embraced
English heritage. His stepfather was a
staunch imperialist who demanded that his stepsons suppress their Czech
background. Stoppard remembers that
when, as a nine-year-old boy, he innocently mentioned his “real” father,
Stoppard’s stepfather replied with resentment, ‘Don't you realise that I made
you British?' Stoppard readily
embraced British traditions; and under his stepfather’s tutelage, he notes,
“I was coming on well as an honorary Englishman. He (Major Stoppard) taught
me to fish, to love the countryside, to speak properly, to respect the
Monarchy.” Happily contented with his
new English lifestyle, Stoppard did not concern himself with his Jewish
heritage until the 1980s when family stories emerged that revealed his
relatives’ deaths in the Holocaust.
When he began to support the cause of Russian Jews, his stepfather,
whose “Raj-nurtured sense of
superiority over what Kipling called the lesser breeds had long festered into
a bile against Jews, blacks, Irish, Yanks, foreigners in general and the
urban working class” (in Stoppard’s words), wrote to him asking that he cease
using the Stoppard family name. But
Stoppard points out that his Czech roots could never reclaim him—his
formative life experience was still fundamentally English. Still the incongruence of a mixed heritage perhaps
contributes to the postmodern features of his works. (Work Cited: Stoppard Interview. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000166941319210&rtmo=LbtKLyid&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/99/10/15/tlstopp15.html>).
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