Life
Book review: Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook
The chronicle of a petty crime that perhaps adds to our understanding of the Nazis’ intent
May 26, 2022 15:18
The chronicle of a petty crime that perhaps adds to our understanding of the Nazis’ intent
May 26, 2022 15:18Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook
By Karina Urbach, translated by Jamie Bulloch
Quercus Books, £20
In the annals of Holocaust-related literature, there are degrees of suffering ranging from unimaginable agonies in concentration camps, to nightmares endured by those who survived.
Karina Urbach’s densely researched Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, falls into neither category. It is the story of Alice Urbach, a woman from a well-off Viennese Jewish family, who achieved unexpected success with her 1935 book, So Kocht Man in Wien!, or Cooking the Viennese Way, a mouthwatering-sounding compendium which was praised by one reviewer in particular for its chapter on “Viennese desserts and pastries…stretched apple strudel, carnival doughnuts, shredded pancake”.
It was a bestseller, until the Nazis made it impossible for any publisher to profit from a book written by someone Jewish. Instead, Alice’s publisher “Aryanised” the book by putting out a new edition with another author, Rudolf Rosch, though the work was entirely Alice’s own.
Clearly this was plagiarism, or as Urbach puts it, book theft, on an acute scale. But it is also thin pickings on which to base more than 300 pages of research. Urbach, and her cousin Katrina, succeeded in having the copyright restored as recently as 2020, a long 40 years after Alice’s death.
So, bereft of much more dramatic material, Urbach concentrates on the unfolding wartime experiences of Alice’s two sons, Otto and Karl.
It makes for insubstantial reading, not least since that much of what Otto (Karina’s father) did is still classified, so there is a great deal of “would have been” speculation. More interesting are Alice’s own ventures, including running a home for Jewish child refugees in Newcastle and the Lake District, and a triumphant return to teaching cooking, in America, in her 90s. We learn this spirited woman put her success down to her love for striking up conversations with strangers. In Vienna she would even wait outside delicatessens. “I got half of my cookery school pupils by talking to every woman I met… They didn’t have the slightest idea how such [culinary] miracles could be created”.
Still, I wanted to know a good deal more about Alice and a good deal less about Otto. Alice also wrote a further two cookbooks, one of which was about vegetarian food – I could have done with a recipe or two.
In the great scheme of things, having her book stolen from her was not the worst thing that could have happened to Alice Urbach, who, after all, survived the Holocaust.
But the sheer pettiness of the crime perhaps adds to our understanding of the Nazi intent: to rob Jews of any shred of standing, dignity or entitlement.
From that viewpoint, Alice’s is a story worth telling.