Tom Stoppard, the playwright and screenwriter who died on Saturday at 88, set plays in imperial Britain, czarist Russia and Communist Czechoslovakia. He wrote movie lines for characters who included William Shakespeare and Indiana Jones. His work concerned love and divorce, poetry and rock ‘n’ roll.

Yet, entering his ninth decade, Stoppard had not yet written directly about a core aspect of his own life, including a shocking revelation that he learned in late middle age: His Jewishness.

That changed in January 2020, when Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstadt” debuted in London before opening on Broadway in 2022, where it won the Tony Award for best play the following year. “Leopoldstadt” was the Jewish drama that Stoppard at long last got around to writing.

Perhaps most remarkable was the show’s ending, in which Stoppard appeared to address himself — and take himself to task. Exactly as Shakespeare, his lifelong hero, is understood to have done at the close of his own late work, “The Tempest,” Stoppard concluded “Leopoldstadt” with a self-reflective, personal coda.

The play tells the story of an extended family of assimilated Viennese Jews, the Merzes, from 1899 to 1938. The closing scene, though, is set in 1955, and a new character, an ostensible Englishman named Leonard Chamberlain — who is in fact a Merz, born Leopold Rosenbaum — is chastised by a relative for forgetting, or perhaps avoiding, where he came from.

“I loved being English,” Chamberlain says. “English books, and the seaside and listening to the radio … Mother and I only spoke English. I didn’t know I had an accent till I lost it.”

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