Alice's Book

The story of a Jewish chef whose bestselling cookbook was expropriated by the Nazis, and who had to rebuild her life in England and the United StatesAlice Urbach was a successful pastry chef in Vienna in the 1930s, with a bestselling book and her own cooking school. But after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, she was forced to flee like so many other Jews. Alice escapes to England and spends the war years looking after Jewish refugee children in a home in the Lake District. Meanwhile, her younger son is imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, Otto, having already emigrated to the United States, becomes an intelligence office fighting the Nazis underground. When she returns to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her book, So Kocht Man in Wien!, is published under the name Rudolf Roesch. But did he even exist? When confronted, her publisher refused to give her back the rights. Abandoning hope, she emigrates to the United States to start afresh, opening a Viennese pastry school in San Francisco and eventually appearing on American television. Her dream to publish her cookbook in English under her own name remained unfulfilled before her death in 1983. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach - Alice's granddaughter - sets out to uncover the true story behind the stolen cookbook. Her research takes her from Vienna, to London and Washington. In archives she finds letters and other documents that were assumed long lost. Alice Urbach's German publisher has all along adamantly refused compensation - until October 2020, when the publication of her granddaughter's book brought renewed attention to the case.Harrowing and incredibly moving, Alice's Book tells the story of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horrors of WWII to begin a new life on the other side of the world. Karina Urbach sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish non-fiction authors, and the books they could not afford to burn.Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch