Alice's Book

“A remarkable and important story” BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour

“Unputdownable . . . Urbach has also retold the tragic Holocaust story in quite unforgettable lines” A.N. Wilson

“In a remarkable new book, Alice’s granddaughter Karina, a noted historian, has traced what happened to her family but also what happened to the cookbook” Daniel Finkelstein

“This fascinating book, by Alice’s granddaughter Karina Urbach, shines a spotlight on this lesser-known aspect of Nazi looting” The Times

“A gripping piece of 20th-century family history but also something much more original: a rare insight into the ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish-authored books during the Nazi regime” Financial Times

What happened to the books that were too valuable to burn?

Alice Urbach had her own cooking school in Vienna, but in 1938 she was forced to flee to England, like so many others. Her younger son was imprisoned in Dachau, and her older son, having emigrated to the United States, became an intelligence officer in the struggle against the Nazis.

Returning to the ruins of Vienna in the late 1940s, she discovers that her bestselling cookbook has been published under someone else’s name. Now, eighty years later, the historian Karina Urbach – Alice’s granddaughter – sets out to uncover the truth behind the stolen cookbook, and tells the story of a family torn apart by the Nazi regime, of a woman who, with her unwavering passion for cooking, survived the horror and losses of the Holocaust to begin a new life in America.

Impeccably researched and incredibly moving, Alice’s Book sheds light on an untold chapter in the history of Nazi crimes against Jewish authors.

“As this engaging memoir makes clear, the theft of the cookbook remained for Alice’s entire life the symbol of everything that had been taken from her” TLS

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Author Biography

Karina Urbach is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of London. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge and has taken part in several BBC, PBS and ZDF documentaries. Her 2017 book Go-Betweens for Hitler (OUP) triggered a debate in the UK about the Royal family’s links to Nazi Germany. Her biography of Queen Victoria was published with great acclaim in Germany. For her historical novel Cambridge 5 (written under the pseudonym Hannah Coler) she was shortlisted for three literary prizes and won the Crime Cologne Award in 2018. She now lives in Cambridge, UK.