Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook by Karina Urbach,
translated by Jamie Bulloch

Alice Urbach’s bestselling cookbook of 1935 had a delightfully idiomatic Viennese title ending with an exclamation mark: So Kocht Man in Wien! (“So Cooks One in Vienna!”). It captured the jocund spirit of its author, an accomplished cook who was always smiling, rolling pastry and using exclamation marks, and of her beloved city, a center of culinary excellence that (she thought) welcomed assimilated Jews like herself.

In September 1938, after the Nazi Anschluss, Alice’s name was removed from her book. She was summoned to her publisher, Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, and told by her editor, Hermann Jungck, to hand over all her copyright and publishing rights. Quaking and powerless in the new overtly anti-Semitic regime, she signed.