‘The Lost Café Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth’
By Meriel Schindler
W.W. Norton & Company, 432 pages

Meriel Schindler’s “The Lost Café Schindler: One Family, Two Wars, and the Search for Truth,” doesn’t fit into any one box. It’s part generational trauma, part Holocaust survival tale, part self-discovery, part life in a small Austrian town, and all page turner.

Ms. Schindler’s original goal was personal: To write a history for her children. As it grew into the story of a Jewish institution that defied the goosestepping of time, a teacher told her that it was “commercial.” The remark came as a surprise; it took a tick to realize that he’d meant the word as a positive.

Entering her father Kurt Schindler’s cottage after his death in 2017, Ms. Schindler was confronted by a mess and mixed feelings. Kurt had been a packrat prone to lies and anger, and his lack of business sense had ended the family’s ownership of the café.

Boxes among the hundreds were full of Nazi-era documents and family records. One contained a punch in the stomach: Ms. Schindler’s father had hired a private investigator to spy on her. Nameless faces stared out from photo albums, imploring or daring her to uncover their mysteries.

A labor lawyer, Ms. Schindler accepted the challenge, bringing order to the chaos that had been her father’s life. All this, and “The Lost Café Schindler” has recipes, too. It is, she joked during a book event I emceed at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City, “the only Holocaust book you can use in the kitchen.”

Ms. Schindler told me in our History Author Show interview that her literary agent, publisher, and editor “were totally against” the recipes. “They thought it would confuse booksellers,” she said, “because they wouldn’t know whether to put it in the cookery, history, or memoir section.”

The recipes hail from Ms. Schindler’s grandfather, Hugo Schindler. The café he opened in 1922 abides on the main avenue of Innsbruck, Austria, resurrected from the ashes in 2010. Townsfolk, steeped in nostalgia for the original, insisted that a new restaurant in the old building could be called nothing else.

“It was one of the first places in western Austria you had jazz,” Ms. Schindler said, “and my grandfather loved music. So, you had a combination of live music, dancing, really good coffee — really good cake and other meals — plus his own homebrewed liqueurs and schnapps.” 

Hugo endured the horrors of World War I as a soldier for the Austro-Hungarian Empire fighting in the Alps. After the disintegration of the country, he sought to bring some joy to Innsbruck. His café thrived and the Schindlers were beloved, seen as no different for their religion than others.

That changed after the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. The Nazis seized the café and used it as an officer’s club, Café Heibl, silencing the jazz, which they considered degenerate. Neighbors turned hostile. Kurt often told a story of witnessing Hugo beaten with a sled on Kristallnacht.

The story turned out to be fiction, but Hugo’s persecution was real. Out of this trauma, Kurt taught Ms. Schindler to hide her Jewish roots. Growing up in Britain and educated in Austria during the Cold War, she sat silent as Austrians claimed that they had been “Hitler’s first victims” and the British had invented concentration camps.

The most sensational story of the many Kurt weaved was true. His uncle, Dr. Eduard Bloch, treated Hitler’s mother when she had cancer, Ms. Schindler writes, earning the future despot’s protection during the Holocaust. Claims that everyone from Oskar Schindler to Franz Kafka were relatives proved harder to document. 

As each box of memory is opened, “The Lost Café Schindler” maintains an optimistic tone, one of defiance by the people Hitler sought to destroy. Today, the café is “the only previously Jewish-owned business still operating in Innsbruck,” Ms. Schindler reckons, “and although I don’t own shares in it, I am delighted to have my name above the door.”

Readers will enjoy walking through that door to sip schnapps and dance until dawn during the sunnier times of the past century. Jewish or not, they’ll find their own family stories in “The Lost Café Schindler.” It offers a taste of the past, as bitter as loss but as sweet as Hugo’s strudel.