Library

Viennese Jewish girl Alice Urbach loved cooking since she was a child. She had an unhappy marriage. Her husband was a drunkard and a gambler, and all her dowry was lost. After her husband passed away, Alice relied on her superb cooking skills to support her family independently, and worked hard to build a career, opening a cooking school and publishing best-selling cookbooks. Under the Nazi rule, she lost her home and career, fled to England, and worked as a maid for a wealthy woman in a castle. Later, she took care of Jewish girls who were helpless due to the war in a "children's home". Her younger son was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. The eldest son lived in exile in Shanghai for a time, then immigrated to the United States and became an intelligence officer to fight against the Nazi forces. After the war, Alice moved to New York and started a new life. When she returned to Vienna, she discovered that her best-selling cookbook was still being sold, but a strange man's name was printed on the cover. Did the man who calls himself a "cooking guru" in the book really exist? Who is he? Can Alice get her book back? In order to research her grandmother's "stolen" cookbook, the author of this book, Alice's granddaughter Karina Urbach, went to archives in Vienna, London and Washington to unearth letters, tapes and video files that had long been thought to be lost. They revealed the legendary fate of the Alice family, and also revealed an unknown chapter in the history of Nazi crimes in Germany - the Nazis had systematically stolen the intellectual property of the Jews. The legendary experience of Alice and her family is moving and contains many fascinating elements - persecution, murder, fraud, imprisonment, escape, rescue, friendship, and spy activities. It is like a blockbuster movie with a touching plot. The fate of Alice's cookbook is even more sad. As Ben's book shows, for Alice, the stolen cookbook symbolized her "stolen" life.