We are condemned to remember even when we can’t, to paraphrase Santayana’s famous statement. Pinter and Stoppard commit that original sin, according to Carey Perloff, in her new book Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View.In this interview with Carey Perloff that I conducted for The Harold Pinter Review, we discussed how in her book the terror of memory in Pinter’s and Stoppard’s works created a point of comparison between the playwrights.In her book, which is also a primer on directing these two playwrights, Perloff discusses how she became familiar with their work by directing it. By bringing Pinter and Stoppard together in her analysis, she makes the case that their Jewish identity connects them. For Pinter and Stoppard, their heritage and identity is a resource (even as Stoppard says he only later in his life realized his Jewishness), an ongoing theme, and even an aesthetic. Having directed them many times as artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for twenty-five years, Perloff maintains that when their Jewishness is overlooked, the meaning of their work is occasionally diminished.“I wrestled with putting them (Pinter and Stoppard) together, and that’s why the chapter on their Jewish legacy became the first long chapter I wrote, because what I realized is that, that is one thing they have in common.”She continues about Pinter: “All of the subterfuges in that play The Birthday Party, about changing your name and the knock on the door, and the terror of being exposed? And Stanley? What is Stanley guilty of? Is he Jewish? Isn’t he Jewish? He feels that sense of terror when people come after each other for no reason than someone’s sort of secret name. This makes sense coming from the pen of someone who’s lived through that kind of experience.”She also referred to the Pinteresque style, which is not only on display in The Birthday Party, but also in other works of his: “To say nothing of the fact that all of the comedy, you know, the comedy of the play, is sort of Jewish vaudeville.”She acknowledged that his works were Jewish, but not in a religious way. Instead, she elaborates that “when I directed The Homecoming, it felt like a profoundly Jewish play about a family reckoning with one of their members who has married out and has to be reintegrated into the clan. They say, ‘When you find the right girl Sam, let your family know, don’t forget, we’ll give you a number one send-off, I promise you. You can bring her to live here, she can keep us all happy.’”Perloff continued about the ways that Jews in British culture were viewed as the outsider, including their portrayal as demonic, such as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or in Dickens’s Oliver Twist.“Whether or not you think it’s Jewish in any kind of religious way, and neither [Pinter nor Stoppard] were practicing Jews, even though Pinter had a bar mitzvah. But the fact is, to be in Britain during and after the war as a Jew, you were a total outsider.“Pinter’s family came from Central Europe. But strangely he pretended at first that the Pinter name came from Da Pinto, a kind of Spanish-Portuguese Jew. But his grandparents came speaking no English from Central Europe. They worked in the fabric business, and you know his father was a tailor.“Pinter went to a school in Hackney that was 40 percent Jewish. The school was very rigorous in terms of literature, English literature. As Pinter himself described it, the school was full of word-obsessed and culturally voracious Jewish boys who used words and language in an almost Talmudic way, full of games and argument.”We then talked about biblical narratives and how Jews naturally question them, oppose them, try to reconcile them, and continue to interpret in the Jewish paradigm of midrash.“Abraham spends his life arguing with God, negotiating with God. This is what [the late Israeli writer] Amos Oz, does in his brilliant book, Dear Zealot, when he’s trying to write to his grandchildren about the nature of Jewish argumentation, the roots of Jewish language,” Perloff said. “It is a culture that, in their exiles, carries language and learning with them because they can’t carry anything else. It is really germane, I think, to understanding Pinter and Stoppard.“I think when you’ve lived through trauma like Jews did, coming out of the Second World War, whether your family escaped like my family did, and didn’t end up being gassed, or whether your family pretty much entirely was destroyed in the camps, as with Stoppard’s, memory is both seductive and terrifying. In Pinter and Stoppard memory is the thing that they are constantly going after, and yet can never entrap.“Think about a play like No Man’s Land and how heartbreaking it is that the men constantly ask questions like ‘Did you have a good war?’, questions which cannot be answered, because as Pinter himself said, memory is distorted at the moment of its conception. Any moment is distorted and sucked away at the moment that it happens and when you try to go back and remember it, everybody has a different interpretation of what happened. So, memory is extremely elusive and hidden, and yet necessary to unveil and frightening to remember.“And so, the action of both Stoppard and Pinter is how their characters try to reclaim memory, even when it doesn’t seem to be about history, like in Betrayal, when Jerry says, ‘Yes, everyone was there that day, standing around, your husband, my wife, all the kids, I remember. Emma—What day? Jerry—When I threw her up. It was in your kitchen. Emma—It was in your kitchen. Silence.’ You know they don’t even get that memory straight.“We are a people of memory, of memory and of carrying memory with us, and then wanting to bury our memories and realizing how incredibly painful they are. And how do you carry that memory generation to generation? We say that over and over again, and we keep our own history. Our identity in the present is how we navigate our relation to the past. So, as we change our current identity, we reframe what we remember, or we remember it differently.”Perloff reflected on the question of whether Stoppard truly was unaware of his Jewish heritage until his later adult years: “I don’t believe that Stoppard didn’t know he was Jewish; after all he knew why his family had been exiled.“As to his representation of himself at the end of Leopoldstadt, I’m not sure anyone is actually as naive as that character, but maybe they are. A young man comes in named Leonard Chamberlain who seems to know nothing about his past. Rosa says: ‘No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.’“In this way, I think some intuitive knowledge of Pinter and Stoppard’s Jewish past influences and informs our understanding of their plays. It’s what makes the work feel (and I know this is a fraught word) authentic.”Perloff then differentiates Stoppard from Pinter: “Stoppard is a different kind of theater artist because he isn’t an actor or a director, as Pinter was; thus he’s very much a writer who depends upon actors and directors to bring the internal life of his plays to the fore.“However, he’s a trickster and a gamesman. So, every play is highly structured. For example, The Real Thing starts with a scene about the breakup of a marriage. And then you realize that’s a scene in a play, written by the guy in the second scene who is a playwright, writing about a man about to be cuckolded by the actress the playwright’s having an affair with.“So Tom loves games, as he demonstrates even in Leopoldstadt, which is full of mathematics and games of cat’s cradle. I think in general, the English as a culture love games. Pinter and Stoppard played cricket together; that’s another link between them. Games like charades and blind man’s buff are key.”Perloff and I then discussed how both Pinter and Stoppard loved the ability of language to both convey and distort meaning.“In both of their works we see the ways that language can function both as knowledge and as a total lie. It’s what we’re wrestling with today, how language is being weaponized, and conspiracy theories are being developed through language in order to promote an agenda. This is related to Eastern European drama during the Cold War; I think one reason Stoppard loves absurdist language is that there’s such a deep tradition of that kind of writing in Czechoslovakia and Poland.“Victor Shklovsky [Russian literary critic] said that literary language exists to defamiliarize political speech and give language its muscle back. That’s why Pinter is so meticulous about his choice of words. The way Pinter cracks open language so that it exposes the cliches of political speech—he’s absolutely masterful.“For Pinter it is not only what is said, but also what is not said. I wrote about that a lot in the book because if you’re going to write on Pinter, you have to write about the famous pause. But what I learned is, language to Pinter is a stratagem, as he said, to cover nakedness.“You know he’s not a confessional playwright. Neither is Stoppard. Language for them is a smokescreen. So, what happens to a character who runs out of language?“When Goldberg is giving that famous speech in Act 3 of The Birthday Party, he says, ‘because I believe that the world . . .’ And then there’s a silence, and then he repeats, ‘because I believe that the world . . .’ Silence. And then he said the third time, ‘because I believe that the world . . . BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD . . .’ And then he has no more words, and that silence is utterly terrifying, because the audience realizes that this man is bankrupt, that he doesn’t believe anything, and that he’s run out of excuses. So, Pinter is particularly genius at creating the negative space around a torrent of words.“It’s also the case in Pinter that stage movement is like language, and stillness is like silence. So it’s very important in a moment of silence that nobody moves. It’s also a useful rule of thumb in Pinter that you don’t move and talk at the same time. It’s not always true, but is often useful. The language is the action, and you don’t want to dilute it by moving and talking at the same time.”Going back to Stoppard one more time, Perloff and I discuss whether he truly knew about his Jewishness even all the way back in his early career. “His biographer Hermione Lee had all those letters in a carrier bag between him and his mother. And yet, when Kenneth Tynan interviewed him, during Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and said, ‘How is it possible that you know so little about your Jewish past?’ Stoppard’s mother was furious, and said, ‘We weren’t really Jewish. It was just what the Germans made of us when they arrived in Czechoslovakia.’“What’s so moving is the episode in which he met someone in Czechoslovakia who had a scar from a wound his father [a physician] had treated, and Stoppard touched the scar and realized it was the first thing connected to his father that he’d touched since his death.“My mother, Marjorie Perloff, is a famous literary critic. She wrote an amazing book called The Vienna Paradox, which is about her escape from Vienna and becoming an American, and becoming not only an American, but an Americanist, writing on Frank O’Hara and John Cage and Robert Lowell, and American poetry. Only much later in her life has she written about Wittgenstein and Joseph Roth and Viennese work, and I think Tom was immensely fascinated by her. They had had similar wartime experiences and they are similar ages.”At that point in our interview, Perloff made a revelation and told me that the family in Leopoldstadt, which takes place in Vienna rather than in Stoppard’s Czechoslovakia, was in part inspired by Perloff’s own family history. As Jews, they escaped from Vienna (Stoppard’s family escaped from Czechoslovakia) after living a life that embraced Viennese culture.Perloff and I finished our conversation there. What I take away is not only how Pinter and Stoppard use memory as a device, but also how memory closes in on them. So, they must create some distance in order to then get to the nakedness they portray in their plays and they both cloak their Jewish memories in the multiple dynamics of remembering and distancing; revealing and living in hiddenness, just as Pinter once facetiously took the name of Da Pinto, the crypto Jew.A Jewish festival occurs in the spring, about the hiding of one’s face in order to play (shpiel) and perform plays. It is Purim and centers around Queen Esther, whose name is synonymous with the Hebrew term for hiddenness: h’estair. She is a Jewish-born queen in ancient Persia, who is hidden behind the guise of being a queen to escape persecution and hatred toward Jews. But in her hiding, she also lives with the memory of being a Jew and the terror that can occur as a result of being a Jew. It is this memory of terror and hiddenness that haunt Pinter and Stoppard’s works.