The unbelievable story of the (Jewish) cookbook stolen by the Nazis | EUROtoday
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DSince the exceptional success of Daniel Mendelsohn’s guide, The Disappearedinitially revealed within the United States in 2006 by Harper Collins, then revealed in French by Flammarion, microhistory works are on the rise. This manner of telling the saga of a rustic via the singular journey of a handful of people makes it attainable, in actual fact, to sensitively embrace a given interval.
This manner of narrating the future of a nation via characters with whom the creator typically has a kinship, nevertheless, makes the train advanced. If it provides the potential of embodying a historic actuality, it units a formidable lure for the author: “the lack of emotional distance from the people concerned is a great danger”, writes the German historian Karina Urbach.
ALSO READ The two veins of Daniel MendelsohnLike Mendelsohn who reconstructed the journey of his “Ukrainian” great-uncle Shmiel Jäger, swallowed up by the Shoah together with his spouse and 4 daughters; just like the historian Ivan Jablonka who devoted a captivating investigation, – Story of the grandparents I didn’t have (Seuil, 2012) -, to her ancestors, Matès and Idesa, initially from Poland then refugees in France earlier than being murdered at Auschwitz in 1943… Karina Urbach subsequently hesitated for a very long time earlier than embarking on writing a biography of her grandmother, Alice Urbach.
The pre-war years
The story of this lady is emblematic of the future of European Jews. Born Alice Mayer in Vienna on February 5, 1886, Karina Urbach’s grandmother spent her early years in a villa in Döbling, the stylish district of the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Sigmund, is a rich entrepreneur and a widely known determine within the native Jewish neighborhood. He frequented the nation’s intelligentsia and maintained a correspondence with the younger Theodor Herzl who had simply based the Zionist motion.
At the Mayers’ home, we meet the author Arthur Schnitzler, the playwright Felix Salten (the inventor of Bambi), the profitable critic Alfred Polgar but in addition main scientists: such because the physicist Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of the precept of nuclear fission, or her nephew Otto Frisch who would later take part within the Manhattan Project, this system directed by Robert Oppenheimer which led to the event of the American atomic bomb.
Cooking as a lifeline
In this bourgeois universe, it’s an understatement to say that Alice Urbach’s trajectory stands out. She married a penniless physician who squandered her dowry on the on line casino and located herself a widow at 34. The dying of her father in 1920 then the financial disaster noticed her sink economically. She should present for the wants of her youngsters alone.
Gastronomy will put it aside. The younger lady opened a cooking college in 1924 which shortly met with nice success. Especially because the assortment of recipes (entitled “This is how we cook in Vienna”) that she revealed in 1935 was a bestseller in bookstores. His comfy copyrights permit him to get his head above water. But in March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. After the adoption of anti-Jewish legal guidelines, Alice Urbach left the nation in catastrophe to search out refuge in Great Britain. She turned a governess there then labored in a women’ boarding home.
A despoiled creator
Meanwhile, in Austria, his publishing home continued to market his guide however determined to Aryanize it. Alice Urbach’s title disappears from the quilt. The younger lady finds herself robbed of her writings! When it was republished in 1939, his cooking guide was now signed by Rudolf Rösch, a Munich journalist who hosted a cooking present on the radio.
Redacted of its recipes for conventional Jewish dishes, the guide continued to promote all through the battle. Alice Urbach found in 1949 that the work was nonetheless top-of-the-line native sellers. However, she must struggle legally to get well her property.
The thrilling investigation that his granddaughter devotes to Alice recreates this uncommon story. Based on quite a few archives in addition to testimonies collected over almost twenty years, Karina Urbach tells the story of this lady and her household.
His guide describes the situations through which Alice’s sisters, Sidonie Rosenberg and Karoline Löwit-Fleishner, had been murdered on the Theresienstadt focus camp. And how her different sister, Helen Eissler, disappeared, together with her husband, within the Lodz ghetto.
The nice advantage of Karina Urbach’s work consists of introducing the reader to a little-known side of the historical past of spoliations. This manuscript theft, of which Alice Urbach was a sufferer, was additionally skilled by many Jewish authors. Paul Wessel noticed himself, like her, dispossessed of his writings when the college textbooks he had designed… had been revealed, from 1938, with out point out of his title.
Max Friedlander additionally famous that his authorship of his authorized treatises was denied when his work was reattributed to lecturers near the Nazi regime. Finally, the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, creator of quite a few brief tales, was, for his half, plagiarized by shameless writers with the blessing of the Reich authorities. How many have suffered the identical destiny? Difficult to reply this query. Austrian and German publishers are in actual fact reluctant to open their archives.
To Discover
Kangaroo of the day
Answer
In 1946, Alice Urbach moved to the United States the place her two sons, Otto and Karl, had emigrated. She lived in California till her dying in 1983. The Viennese chef established one other cooking college there. She additionally participated in tv cooking exhibits there. In one among them, we see her educating younger individuals how you can put together the choulenta should in Ashkenazi delicacies made with pearl barley, potatoes and beef. A recipe that Rudolf Rösch had excluded from his 1939 version as a result of “too Jewish”.
* The Book of Alice. Or how the Nazis stole my grandmother’s guideby Karina Urbach (revealed by Anne Carrière, 410 pages, €23.90).
https://www.lepoint.fr/livres/l-incroyable-histoire-du-livre-de-cuisine-juive-vole-par-les-nazis-29-10-2025-2602058_37.php