The story of a stolen cookbook. Plus, Elizabeth Strout
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the 1930s, Alice Urbach wrote a beloved cookbook in Vienna. But during the Holocaust it was stolen: Aryanized, peppered with Nazi ideology and republished under someone else's name. The publisher refused to change it back for more than 85 years. Alice got her intellectual rights restored by her granddaughter Karina Urbach, a historian, who joins us to tell the story.
Afterwards, we bring you a conversation with Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, from our recent US FT Weekend festival. She’s in conversation with FT Globetrotter editor Rebecca Rose.
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Want to say hi? We love hearing from you. Email us at [email protected]. We’re on Twitter @ftweekendpod, and Lilah is on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap.
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Links and mentions from the episode:
–FT review of ‘Alice’s Book: How the Nazis stole my Grandmother’s Cookbook’, by Katrina Urbach https://on.ft.com/3z0D8bQ
–A recent piece by Elizabeth Strout for the FT Weekend Magazine, on Judith Joy Ross’s photography: https://on.ft.com/3JdFF4U
–Watch the whole FT Weekend Festival on demand here (paid): https://usftweekendfestival.live.ft.com/page/2064102/program
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Original music by Metaphor Music. Mixing and sound design by Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco.
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Karina Urbach is a self-confessed bad cook. |
| 0:05.0 | And that might be why it took her so long to realize that there was something strange about |
| 0:09.6 | her grandmother's cookbook. |
| 0:12.5 | What did you hear about the book as you were growing up? |
| 0:15.0 | Did she talk about it? |
| 0:16.6 | What did you know? |
| 0:17.6 | Well, I didn't know much. |
| 0:18.6 | I mean, I knew we had these two cookbooks on our shelves, |
| 0:21.5 | and one was with her name on the title. And the other one was by this man called Rudolf |
| 0:27.7 | Fros. And I never really asked the right questions. And it took years, decades really, |
| 0:34.8 | until I found out that this book was taken from her and that a male |
| 0:41.7 | author published it until 1966 under his name. |
| 0:46.7 | That's Karina. |
| 0:47.7 | Her grandmother, Alice Erbach, wrote a cookbook that was extremely popular in Vienna in the 1930s. |
| 0:54.6 | But Alice's family was Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power in 1938, that cookbook was stolen from her. |
| 1:01.9 | It was stripped of all of its Jewish references, and it was republished under a totally different name. |
| 1:08.1 | So they arionized some of the recipes. For example, they erased completely |
| 1:13.9 | Jewish-sounding recipes like the omelette Rothschild, which was now an omelette nature. And even the |
| 1:21.8 | Yaffa tart was suddenly taken out of the book because Yaffa perhaps sounded too Jewish as well. |
| 1:29.7 | So it was really bizarre. |
| 1:32.0 | It was bizarre. |
| 1:35.8 | Over the course of her life, once she learned her book was stolen, Alice tried to get |
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