The Scar on the Hand
IN 1939, WHEN THE BRITISH playwright Tom Stoppard (born Tomáš Sträussler) was a year and a half old, he and his family fled Moravia ahead of the Nazis. In January 1942, they fled again, this time from Singapore to escape Japanese troops. Unfortunately, as Hermione Lee narrates in her biography, Tom’s father, Eugen Sträussler, a doctor, could not leave with them. The ship he finally scrambled aboard two weeks later was bombed and sunk, killing everyone on board. Tom was not yet five years old.
Their own trip rerouted, Tom, his brother, and his mother ended up in India instead of Australia, as they’d intended. Toward the end of their four years there, Marta Sträussler married a British soldier named Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England. Tom never felt close to his stepfather, but he did fall deeply in love with his adopted country, its language, and its ways. English freedom exhilarated him; he experienced himself as uncensored, able to create whatever he wanted—the opposite of what he would have faced had he returned to Eastern Europe. Although he attributed these virtues to a place, I suspect they might also have expressed the positive side of his fatherlessness: his feeling unconstrained by paternal authority, and not pinned down by tradition or demands for fidelity and obedience.
Almost a lifetime later, in 1998 and ’99, the playwright visited his old home in Moravia—now the Czech Republic—finally curious about his family past. While there, he spoke with a woman whose hand his father had stitched when she was a little girl.
The scar that Tom Stoppard touched on Zaria’s hand offers a symbolic compression of flesh and psyche, of the writer’s paternal absence, of skin torn and partially mended, of grief owed and loss displaced, of time traversed.
Stoppard wrote, “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.”
Stoppard’s account resonated with a sentence I’ve long loved from a talk he gave in 1999. Describing the theater revolution embodied by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, he said about their work, “These plays, so unlike Shakespeare, did the thing that makes Shakespeare breathtaking and defines poetry—the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning.”
The phrase captures one way literary craft guides the unconscious mind, allowing tight-wound—as in a spring, or perhaps tight-wound as in a scar—energy to fuel the creation of art. The scar that Stoppard, by then in his early 60s, touched on Zaria’s hand offers a symbolic compression of flesh and psyche, of the writer’s paternal absence, of skin torn and partially mended, of grief owed and loss displaced, of time traversed. It is also one source of creative energy, and a point of origin from which a discussion of writers and early parental loss might expand.
I first got interested in this question long ago, when I began contemplating the story of my grandmother’s death—which occurred in 1929, when my father, the writer Bernard Malamud, was barely 15. Bertha Fidelman had schizophrenia and died in an asylum
