This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: The story of a stolen cookbook. Plus, Elizabeth Strout

Lilah Raptopoulos
Karina Urbach is a self-confessed bad cook, and that might be why it took her so long to realise that there was something strange about her grandmother’s cookbook.

What did you hear about the book as you were growing up? Did she talk about it? What did you know?

Karina Urbach
Well, I didn’t know much. I mean, I knew we had these two cookbooks on our shelves and one was with her name on the title, and the other one was by this man called Rudolf Rösch. And I never really asked the right questions. And it took years, decades really, until I found out that this book was taken from her. And that, a male also published it until 1966 under his name.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Karina. Her grandmother, Alice Urbach, wrote a cookbook that was extremely popular in Vienna in the 1930s. But Alice’s family was Jewish, and when the Nazis came to power in 1938, that cookbook was stolen from her. It was stripped of all of its Jewish references, and it was republished under a totally different name.

Karina Urbach
So they Aryanised some of the recipes. For example, they erased completely Jewish-sounding recipes like the Omelette Rothschild, which was now an omelette natur and even the Jaffa tart was suddenly taken out of the book because Jaffa perhaps sounded too Jewish as well. So it was really bizarre. It was bizarre.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Over the course of her life, once she learnt her book was stolen, Alice tried to get her authorship rights restored. But it never happened. Just recently, in 2020, that’s 85 years after the cookbook was originally published, Karina finally got Alice’s name restored to its rightful place. Today, I have Karina Urbach on to talk about how her research vindicated her grandmother and how it’s paving the way for other people looking to restore intellectual rights. Then we bring you a snippet from the recent US FT Weekend Festival, a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

Voice clip of Alice Urbach
Yes. Let me tell you a little bit about me. I am 95 years of age and nearly six months more. And I come from Vienna and I had a Vienna, Viennese famous cooking school.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice was born in 1886 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. Here she is, just a few years before she died on the PBS cooking show Over Easy.

Voice clip of Alice Urbach
And then I was 70 and divorced in America. I retired. And then at 90 I started again. And I work for Mrs. S Hawkins. And you know what?

Voice clip of TV host
You are 95 now, and you’re still teaching. That’s exciting.

Voice clip of Alice Urbach
Yeah, I’m still teaching . . . 

Karina Urbach
From this cooking school where she taught at 95. She was discovered and then appeared on American television as the oldest cooking teacher in the world. And that was that was wonderful that she got some recognition at the end of her life. So she she she loved that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So, Karina, I would love to hear about your grandmother’s early life. Like, how did she even start cooking?

Karina Urbach
Well, she was a remarkable lady. She grew up in the Habsburg monarchy and as in a very rich Jewish family, a bit of a spoilt girl who was dreamy. But then after the first world war, when the family lost all its money, she suddenly had to work. And she remembered that she had one big passion and that was cooking.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So it’s the 1920s. Alice is living in Vienna. Her husband dies and she needs to support her family. So she sets up a cooking school.

Karina Urbach
So, yes, she had a very big reputation and she also invented catering or brought it to Vienna. And that was something, you know, the newspapers said, oh, we are getting Americanised now. People bring food to the homes and so on. So yes, she did four course dinners and brought things that are natural to us today, completely natural. But that was very modern in the 1920s. So, yes, she was very, very successful with her catering school and her cooking school.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice was actually kind of an innovator in her time. In the years between World War One and World War Two. She was giving lectures across Vienna about new ways to eat like vegetarian, and she was publishing cookbooks in 1935. She published a really popular one. It was called This Is How We Cook in Vienna! with an exclamation mark. Was it Austrian cooking or was it kind of Jewish Austrian cooking?

Karina Urbach
No, the book was very international because the Habsburg monarchy, of course, had so many influences. It had, you know, French influences. It had Italian, Czechoslovakian, you know, it was a very international cosmopolitan book. And she says that also in the introduction of the cookbook, that food is something global and there’s a mixture of wonderful ideas. So, yes, she had a Jewish recipes in there, too.

Lilah Raptopoulos
One of Alice’s signature dishes was the Bridge-Bissen or bridge bites. It was this mini sandwich on a cocktail stick, and it was designed so that if you’re playing the card game bridge, you could eat with one hand and not have to interrupt the game. It was hugely popular. But things changed, and they changed very quickly. In 1938, three years after the book’s publication, the Nazis invaded Austria. Here’s Alice talking about actually seeing Hitler parade into Vienna.

Voice clip of Alice Urbach
Yeah, I think she made a pretty bad version with that. Is the subject of any published . . . 

Karina Urbach
Yeah. Well, of course, in 1938 that was a horrible time when the Nazis annexed Austria. And, and she tried everything to get to America because my father had already made it to Portland, Oregon, as a student and wanted to get her and his brother out and he couldn’t get in every day. But that was something he needed at the time. So Alice then goes to England and her youngest son gets arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It was a horrible time. Her son got out, but her three sisters were murdered in the camps. Alice could never write about it and she barely spoke about it. Karina knows that she took care of refugee children in England through that time, and she knows that she mourned her home. Alice felt Viennese. Her sisters and her homeland all of it had been taken from her. By 1949, the war was over. Alice had finally moved to the US and she had a chance to go back to Vienna.

Karina Urbach
And she was she was very happy to be back in Vienna. But then she was shocked when she saw this book.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Her book.

Karina Urbach
In the shop window.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Just to reiterate, it’s 1949, four years after the war. Alice is back in Vienna and as she’s walking past a bookstore, she sees her book for sale in the window. But now it isn’t her book. Instead of her name on the cover, it has the name of this other guy, Rudolf Rösch. It’s still called This Is How We Cook in Vienna. It still has photos of her hands, which illustrated the book when she first published it. And most of the recipes are the same. But leafing through it, she finds some noticeable changes presumably put in by this Rudolf Rösch.

Karina Urbach
He Nazified the book. So he took out all the international recipes. He took out passages where Alice, for example, talks about how to treat your mate, you know? She was very good about this. Of course he took that out because the Nazis had slave labour. You know, they were exploiting Polish women or Czech women so they didn’t want to hear ‘Be nice to your mate.’ So these things were completely erased.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So what happened next? Karina, how did she try to prove that the book was hers?

Karina Urbach
Well, yes, she writes to her publisher after she has seen this book in ‘49 and says, ‘Well, you know, I’m still alive and it would be nice to get the book back. And can I now get my book back?’ She writes him about 17 letters in the 1950s. Of this yeah, in a very polite way, begging him for it. I mean, it’s really it’s heartbreaking because she then goes back again and again to Vienna and publishes all kinds of excuses because she had submitted two more manuscripts in ‘38 that he also publishes under the name Rudolf Rosch, you know. And he doesn’t give her back anything. He always has excuses. She says to him, ‘But I do understand that you in the Nazi time, you couldn’t publish it under my name. But now, of course you could.’ And yeah, he fobs off.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice’s publisher, Hermann Jungck, and the publishing house he worked for refused to give Alice her authorship back for years. In the 1970s, Jungck even published a piece that said he’d had to find someone to update Alice’s recipes because they weren’t good enough. They were too rich. He also said the book had been unpopular when it came out that Rudolf Rösch fixed it. But here’s the thing no one even knows if Rudolf Rösch existed. So was he even real? Do you know for sure?

Karina Urbach
That’s something I’ve been wondering about. And I found so many Rudolf Rösches in the telephone book because I saw a person named after their grandfather.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Is that right?

Karina Urbach
But no, I couldn’t find anyone who could remember this cook Rudolf Rosch. And I think that the publishing house might have invented him. And of course, I asked the lady who runs this publishing house now, and she said, ‘No, he existed.’ But she didn’t want to give me any information about him.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow. Even now?

Karina Urbach
No, that was, that’s the only mystery that I haven’t solved yet.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alice tried one final time in the 1980s to get the publishing house to restore her name to the book.

Karina Urbach
They said, ‘We don’t know what this is about. We have no material on this case because our archives were lost.’ So that was the general excuse. We lost our archives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Then in 1983, Alice died. She was 97 and she still hadn’t gotten her authorship back. But in 2014, Karina, who’s a Cambridge historian that actually specialises in the Nazi period, started digging into her family history. Because they were a little famous there was a lot of history to find. So she collected family letters and newspaper clippings and national archive materials, and she published her own book in 2020. It’s called Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook. And that seemed to work.

Karina Urbach
And of course, then my book came out in Germany, and it caused a bit of a scandal. Then they said, ‘Oh, yes, we have found our archives again. Sorry.’ So we do have archives. But I mean, lots of German publishing houses have that excuse. They always say, Oh, these things got lost to the second book. We’re very sorry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So your book is published. This book we’re discussing now, Alice’s Book. It was published in German. And then suddenly Alice’s rights are restored and the business sort of continued to profit off of her work long after the Holocaust was over. A Jewish woman’s work. I guess I’m. I’m curious sort of how you feel about it.

Karina Urbach
Well, you know, I did feel a bit angry, to be honest, but I had to suppress that because I’m a historian. I mean, historian first, granddaughter’s second. So when I wrote the book, I didn’t want to emote. I wanted to write in a very detached way. And I one chapter about the publishing house was a bit angry. And my German editors said, well, ‘You have to cut certain sentences out because we might get sued.’ So she was very worried that the publishing house would react badly and it would be a lawsuit coming up. And then, of course, the opposite happened because when the book came out in Germany, you know, the Der Spiegel, our political magazine ran a big story. And suddenly the publishing house, I think, got a bit scared.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Karina has been clear this entire time that she wasn’t looking for money, just credit. And can I ask, why didn’t you want. Why didn’t you ask for money?

Karina Urbach
Well, I thought that would have been very it would have sounded bitter or it wasn’t it wasn’t my place to ask for. I mean, Alice could have asked for it, but not me, I thought. And then, of course, if I had asked for money, then of course they might have gone to court and wouldn’t have given back the authorship to her. And that was more important that she’s on the cover again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Ugh, I want you to have money for your family. (laughter)

Karina Urbach
Well, you know, I’m a poor academic, so any time.

[LAUGHTER]

Lilah Raptopoulos
And that’s that, right? Happy ending. Well, not quite, because it turns out there are a lot more Jewish authors whose books were stolen during the Holocaust. Famous books. Books that Karina herself assumed were written by German authors. And what Karina hopes is that her work will lead to more rights being restored.

Karina Urbach
I thought she was unique. You know, I thought, oh, perhaps this just happened to her because she was a woman. But no, I mean, the Nazis did it to other Jewish authors. And I found a colleague, for example, who worked on Joseph Lubin, who was a Jewish also in the 1930. A man who wrote the most important standard book on family health. And I even know that book. I mean, I had it when I was growing up in Germany and I couldn’t believe it that this had been stolen from him by some German Nazi medic. Some some guy who built his whole postwar career on this book. And I hadn’t got it. Yeah. And so we find more and more cases. Right. That’s wonderful, because of course, I want to incentivise other historians to look for them. And so we could at least give back these books to the authors posthumously.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Karina, thank you so much for your work and for being on the show. This was so fascinating.

Karina Urbach
Oh, thank you Lilah. That was wonderful for me to talk with you about it. Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
A beautiful written piece on Karina’s grandmother story by Christian House will be published in the FT Weekend magazine in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we’ve put the link to the review of Alice’s book in the show notes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Elizabeth Strout is the kind of novelist whose characters are very present in her life. They’re with her, or they appear to her. Like in her book Olive Kitteridge, there’s the story called Starving about a couple where the woman has anorexia.

Elizabeth Strout
That couple, only the woman that I saw, the young woman I saw was not ill. But there was this couple on the subway across from me probably five or six years earlier than that story ever showed up. And that was exactly what the couple was wearing. That she was wearing that little denim jacket with the fake fur, and she was sitting on her boyfriend’s lap on the subway and she was saying, You’re smelling me. I know you’re smelling me. And I just thought, oh, my God, they are so adorable. And that was it. They got off or I got off. And then six years later or whenever I need, I thought, Oh, right, let’s get a couple. And then I thought, boom, there they are.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Elizabeth speaking to my colleague Rebecca Rose, who’s the editor of FT Globetrotter on stage recently at the US FT Weekend Festival. Rebecca is a big fan of Elizabeth’s books, which have won a ton of awards, including a Pulitzer. Much of Elizabeth’s work revolves around two worlds. There’s the Olive Kitteridge world about this prickly woman from coastal Maine. She’s written two books in that world, and there was an HBO adaptation of Olive starring Frances McDormand that won eight Emmys. And then there’s the world of Lucy Barton, who’s a writer who lives in New York. There are three books in her world, and a new one is coming out soon. Here’s Rebecca in conversation with Elizabeth Strout.

Rebecca Rose
I’m feeling very privileged to talk to you as well. Thank you so much for coming today.

Elizabeth Strout
My pleasure to be here.

Rebecca Rose
Elizabeth, you’re really the most amazing writer of character I can think of. And I’m sure all of you agree it’s impossible to imagine a world without Olive Kitteridge or Lucy Barton. And Olive and Lucy, you’ve created real complicated, fascinating and daring and at times maddening heroines. And best of all, the heroines of a certain age, which is a rarity. There’s so much I want to talk to you about today, but I’m going to dive straight in with my first question, which may be a tricky one for you to answer. How did Olive and Lucy come about? Do they come to you bit by bit? Were they perfectly, fully-formed?

Elizabeth Strout
They came to me very differently, actually. Olive came to me. You know, I was unloading the dishwasher and or loading, it was something I was doing the dishwasher and there was I could just often feel a presence behind me. And I mean, I don’t want you to think that I’m psychotic. I mean, I knew that. I knew it wasn’t real. I’m just telling you that I could feel a huge presence behind me and I could hear in this woman’s head the words going, It’s high time everyone left and I realised I have got to get that down. And so I went immediately and wrote down the scene of Olive at her son’s wedding, which was the first Olive story that I wrote. So she really arrived pretty fully formed. I mean, she just showed up. Boom! And then Lucy Barton was really, really different. Like, Lucy’s voice came to me as, like, a really fine gold thread coming from the ceiling or from the sky. And so I thought, what is this? So I had to keep trying to hear this fine gold thread, which is her voice, basically. And then I wrote just a few pages of it. And for some reason that I still can’t understand because I never gave my editor anything early, never did. But there was an attachment to some email that I had, and she wrote back and she said, I love this. You must write this.

Rebecca Rose
So both Olive and Lucy come from Maine. Lucy from Amgash, a poor farming town and Olive from a seaside town. Would you say that Olive and Lucy are really products of Maine? And perhaps you could talk a little bit about for people who may not know, what is the spirit of Maine?

Elizabeth Strout
Well, Olive definitely comes from Maine. And she’s very proud of coming from Maine. She’s one of those Mainers that’s very proud of coming from Maine, as many Mainers are, and I guess should be. But Maine is physically beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. And there’s many different kinds of Maine and there’s a reticence to the people. And Lucy Barton comes from the Midwest, but she comes from culturally a similar thing because as Lucy’s mother says to her, our forefathers came here from England first to Provincetown, and then the brave ones went west. So Lucy’s mother also feels a kinship with her ancestors who were brave enough to go west. But the two places are physically very different.

Rebecca Rose
I think that while they are products of where they come from, there’s a universality to Olive and Lucy. And I was thinking the other day that I’m sure that everybody sometimes feels that they’re feeling a bit Olive or quiet and introspective like Lucy. And I think for men and women alike, there’s something that everyone can recognise in these characters.

Elizabeth Strout
Yeah, I hope so. And I sort of assume so just because, especially with Olive Kitteridge, when I first went out on the road with it, it was so interesting to meet so many people who would just very cheerfully say, Oh, I’m Olive. And I go, okay. Or, you know, some husband would say, Well, now I understand my wife better. She’s Olive. And they would say it like they were happy to understand something. And I thought, that’s so interesting.

Rebecca Rose
I was thinking about in Anything Is Possible how you zero in on many of the characters you need to My Name is Lucy Barton and I imagine in my head and I’m sure you this is not the case at home you have one of those detective boards like a detective show with little bits of string joining up all the characters because it’s so intertwined. How do you manage to . ..

Elizabeth Strout
Yeah, it’s all in my head. It’s all in my head. And my house is messy, just so you know. It’s like I always remember reading an essay where some woman said. You can either have a clean house or you can be a writer. So I guess that I mean, it’s not it’s not dirty. It’s just messy. All these characters are in my head. And as I was writing My Name Is Lucy Barton, I thought, Oh, well, what did happen to Kathie Nicely? Where is she now? And so I would move around to the other side of this table that I work on, and I would write a scene about where Kathie Nicely was right then, or (inaudible) Nicely or her sister or, you know, all these different people would come to me as I was writing the book and it was almost like a constellation. Like that’s how I saw it as here’s the light and there’s the light, and let’s get Charlie, you know, recalling there and then he’ll connect with. So it was all in my head. And, and by the time I was done writing My Name Is Lucy Barton, I realised I practically had another book almost done, you know, waiting in the wings. Yeah, right. Because I had written so many scenes.

Rebecca Rose
I felt so sad when I finished the Lucy books and the Olive books. And I wondered, do people ask you when you bring them back, you know, or do you how do you decide how did you decide to revisit Olive or Lucy?

Elizabeth Strout
Well, Olive just showed up again that time I was in a café in Oslo. And I was just checking my emails and she just showed up late and she just literally showed up that time. She was getting out of her car. She had a cane, she was walking to the marina. And that story was written by the end of that weekend. And I thought, All right, let’s go.

Rebecca Rose
So My Name Is Lucy Barton was adapted to stage with Laura Linney, and obviously Olive Kitteridge became the HBO series with Frances McDormand. And I wondered if I may ask how it feels to see an actor embody your characters. And do you have sort of protective urges about handing over these characters in that way?

Elizabeth Strout
It’s just so strange. I can’t really even describe what it’s like. First of all, the only reason that they both did that was because I trusted them. Because, you know, otherwise, you know, I’m not a person who’s looking to have my stuff made into movies or plays. And it’s just so it’s just so weird to watch it, you know. It feels like it doesn’t really have much to do with me except that I know the words, you know.

Rebecca Rose
But when you think of Olive, when she pops up again, you’re not thinking of Frances McDormand. I think of, you know . . . 

Elizabeth Strout
No, my Olive was already entrenched in me as my Olive. And I mean, I think she did a great job. A wonderful job. But now my whole life, when I went back to rewrite, I mean, to write again. And she was she was still my Olive.

Rebecca Rose
But I did want to ask whether you would consider creating another character like Lucy and Olive. Do you think that that’s going to she’s going to appear suddenly?

Elizabeth Strout
I think that, first of all, I don’t know. I have no idea. But I think that, you know, I have created enough characters to last me the rest of my life because I can go back to any of my characters happily. You know.

Rebecca Rose
So maybe a minor character might pop up, come to the surface.

Elizabeth Strout
Yeah yeah. Something like that.

Rebecca Rose
I hope so.

Elizabeth Strout
Right.

Rebecca Rose
I wanted to ask you will we meet Olive or Lucy again can you tell us?

Elizabeth Strout
Yes. I have a book coming out in September called Lucy by the Sea.

Rebecca Rose
Can you tell us a little more?

Elizabeth Strout
Oh, I’m just not sure if I’m supposed to, but . . . 

Rebecca Rose
I think we’ve already got an image in our head of what Lucy By The Sea would mean.

Elizabeth Strout
Well, you know, anyway, I hope my agents not mad at me about this.

Rebecca Rose
She doesn’t go to live with Olive, does she?

Elizabeth Strout
No, she doesn’t get to live with Olive, but she goes to the town where Olive lives. William has a connection through one of his previous girlfriends who was married to Bob Burgess, who was living in Crosby, Maine. And so when the pandemic hits, there’s a house in Crosby, Maine, that William takes Lucy off to to save her life.

Rebecca Rose
That’s unbelievably exciting. I’m just so thrilled to hear that there’s another book coming out, and that’s in September.

Elizabeth Strout
September.

Rebecca Rose
Fantastic. Well, Elizabeth thank you very much. It’s an honour and a pleasure.

Elizabeth Strout
Thank you.

Rebecca Rose
Thank you so much for coming.

Elizabeth Strout
Oh, you’re very welcome. It’s been my pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend the podcast from the Financial Times. Please do share the show with your friends and on social media. If you like listening, that is the best way to support us. It really helps people find the show. Also, keep in touch. Let me know what you’re reading or watching or thinking about. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com or on Twitter at @ftweekendpod, and you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at @lilahrap. Also in the show notes is a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT, including 50% off a digital sub. Those offers are at FT.com/ftweekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my extraordinary team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our assistant producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Zoe Sullivan is our contributing producer and Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And thanks go as ever to Cheryl Brumley and Renee Kaplan. Take care. And we will find each other again next week.

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