ALICE'S BOOK How the Nazis stole my Grandmother’s Cookbook, .
Karina Urbach
This remarkable book tells the story of one woman from Vienna - but also takes an enthralled reader all over the world from China to the USA and England. Karina Urbach’s book was first published in Berlin - in German. It is clearly well translated, the brisk direct personality behind it, Alice herself, emerges as a determined, imaginative devotee of hard work and resilience. The book itself is dense and fascinating. It has pace, detail, revelations and brilliant momentum to buoy any reader up and over its tragic territory. It is a beacon of hope and an affirmation of the human spirit.
But it doesn’t do what it says on the tin. Karina Urbach writes about her grandmother and her struggle to assert ownership of her best -selling cookbook So Kocht Mann in Wien- Viennese Cooking . And of course the little known theft of Jewish books is appalling . But against the wider epic drama of the Urbach family and Alice’s achievements in England and America, this seems an (admittedly disappointing) detail.
Vienna in all its glittering pre-war glory emerges in the book's first pages, when a group of tall sporty American college students, Cordelia Dobson and her brother and sisters, along with their Austrian hosts, the Urbachs attend the Vienna State Opera for a performance of Eugene Onegin. It was March 11th 1938 - the night the Prime Minster announced his resignation, forced from power by the encroaching Nazis. Dinner after the opera was cancelled. Life would never be the same again for both families. In the pages which follow, all densely researched, Alice and her sons Otto (the author’s father) and Karl, Karli ( a medical student, later snatched suddenly from brutal imprisonment in Dachau ), the fascinating Cordelia ( who later works in Europe for the American secret service) and her even more alluring sister become all part of an international drama. The author takes us with Otto to the horrors of the destruction of Shang-Hai by the Japanese to the palmy Shangrila of Reed College Oregon, School of Engineering and Design where Mr. Dobson holds sway and allows Otto an escape route from the gathering clouds of late thirties fascism. Delightful details abound - enterprising Otto begins a ski school and begins the USA's love affair with snow sports - he writes home to Karli with an order for ski sweaters and posters for his new on-campus shop.
Meanwhile Alice, liberated from a disastrous marriage to an unfaithful alchoholic philanderer husband - he diesdebt ridden aged 44, has made her own way in the world. She sets up a Cookery School in the basement of an old school, and after a first day with only one attendee, soon catches the mood of the modern woman , now without servants in Vienna, . The adjoining restaurant becomes the most sought-after venue in Vienna. The Cookbook follows. Alice is in clover.
But it is now 1938.The horrors are about to begin. Alice is manoeuvred to England - she can remember nothing of the final weeks in Vienna, her granddaughter speculates she refused to even recall them, so little did they chime with her view of herself which was so far from a victim.
In England Alice finds work ( all immigrants had to work as domestics ) cooking for a horrendous woman, the chatelaine of Harlaxton Manor, (now the set for Downton Abbey), but sacked when her employer fails to lose weight on her constant diet - the new chef's cooking is so irresistible. Alice became friends with Anna Freud , and took a post running a hostel for emigré young girls in Tynemouth. With Anna’s advice - and Anna's nutritional know- how, the poor children there, bereft and despairing, weathered the worst of their bereavement and loss.
The photographs in the book are intriguing. We see the dashing Karl, as he graduates , Otto in the USA, glamorous Cordelia and family. And we get totally fascinating snippets of interconnection - Reed College’s principal was Steve Jobs’ tutor.
The loss of control over Alice’s cookbook So Kocht Mann in Wien is infuriating. And she was upset over it herself - yet when you look at pictures of her in her nineties, cheerfully teaching pupils in her San Francisco Cookery School, the determined creative generous survivor emerges stronger than any literary loss. Her own last sadnesses were for her sisters Sidonie and Helene murdered in Theresenbad .
