Overture of Hope: Riveting story of British sisters who saved Jewish opera stars from Nazis

A few searches opened the door to the curious story of the Cook sisters for author Isabel Vincent

Jewish Book Festival

When: Feb. 11-16

Where: Jewish Community Centre

Tickets and info: jccgv.com 

Have you heard about the pair of English opera groupies who saved 29 Jews from Adolf Hitler’s evil plan?

Probably not.

Reporter and author Isabel Vincent hadn’t either until a friend of a friend told her about a monument dedicated to Ida and Louise Cook at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority in Jerusalem.

Vincent, an investigative reporter with the New York Post and the author or seven non-fiction books, wanted to know more. So close to five years and much digging later Vincent last fall delivered the wonderful non-fiction page turner Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan that Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars from the Third Reich.

Vincent, a Toronto native and former National Post and Globe and Mail reporter, will be on hand to talk about her book at this year’s Vancouver Jewish Book Festival on Feb. 11-16. Authors from Canada, Israel, Germany and the U.S. will be taking part in the event that offers a platform to celebrate Jewish authors or Jewish subject matters.

Overture of Hope tells the story of the Cooks, who were part of a generation of “surplus” women whose chances at marriage and motherhood were destroyed by the First World War. The pair discovered opera and it consumed them as they penny-pinched their way through their office worker lives to save enough money for tickets and travel to see shows. Germany and Austria were favourite locations for the fangirls. But everything began to change as the Third Reich’s power began to grow. Worried for friends, the sisters set out to help people navigate visa and immigration quotas. As the Nazis bore down, the Cooks helped people get assets out of the country — often by pinning expensive jewelry to their unflashy Marks & Spencer sweaters. Border officials never expected two spinster office workers from London to own real jewels.

“On so many levels it’s a story of women forgotten by history and women who weren’t glamorous and how they used their lack of glamour to do what they did … because they weren’t noticed and they used that and knew that,” said Vincent during an interview from West Hampton Beach, N.Y. “That really spoke to me.”

Vincent’s research began with the internet, where she found a few articles about the Cooks, who were posthumously honoured in 2010 with the British Hero of the Holocaust Award.

“I thought there has to be more to this story,” said Vincent, who visited the Yad Vashem and was able to read letters from survivors describing how Ida and Louise helped them flee the Nazis. Those letters were paramount as Louise, later in life, had destroyed any records the sisters had about the people they helped.

“That was key because you had the story in the words of the people they had saved,” said Vincent.  “You had these very long letters to the head of Yad Vashem saying this is the story and I saw them all and that’s how I filled in the pieces. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle because you had that, but I still needed more.”

Ida, who wrote romance novels under the name Mary Burchell, in her lifetime wrote over 200 books including the 1956 memoir We Followed Our Stars.  However, Vincent explained that Ida was an untrustworthy narrator.

“I think I read it five or six times and realized that in my own research there were things she just wasn’t reporting that she must have known,” said Vincent noting that scandalous, well-reported love affairs between opera’s elite were never mentioned on Ida’s chaste pages.

There was talk in some circles that the sisters may have been spies. That theory doesn’t seem like such a stretch considering the London apartment that they offered up to Jews was in a building that also housed the odious MP and leader of the British Union of Fascists Oswald Mosely, Free France, and members of MI-6.

“It’s weird,” said Vincent about the interesting neighbours. “That’s why at first I thought they must have been in this whole spy network, but people assured me no. That they just did this on their own.”

And probably did a lot of it because they would do anything to please the complicated and dashing divo Clemens Krauss, an Austrian conductor and Hitler favourite.

Ida under her pen name wrote The Warrender Saga, a series of 13 novels about a difficult, imperious, and wildly talented conductor.

“Clemens Krauss is fascinating and complicated. On one hand he is writing Hitler’s secretary demanding the Jewish apartments in Munich for his opera performers and then on the other hand it’s like, ‘help me save these people who are going to die if we don’t help them,’” said Vincent. “The complexity of that just really spoke to me.”

The Cook’s story is packed with complex twists and turns but at its core it is a story of everyday people doing extraordinary things.

“I hope people look at the activism of these two sisters who could have chosen just to go to the opera and not be concerned with everything going on around them. But they were really faced with a big moral challenge, and they might not have been perfect people and they rose to the occasion,” said Vincent. “So, when we look at heroes, it’s always somebody that is really elevated, but Ida and Louise could have been you and me. Sort of middle-class women growing up in England in love with the sort of Kim Kardashians of their time.

“In the end it’s their perseverance.”

Vincent’s story about the Cooks is just one the interesting topics set to be discussed at the Jewish Book Festival. Now in its 38th year the festival is returning to a full in-person schedule after living online due to the pandemic.

“The fact we can have a full festival back in our rooms and we can welcome people is beyond exciting,” said festival director Dana Camil Hewitt.

The festival kicks off on Opening Night with Dr. Gabor Maté whose latest book is The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.

Vincent closes the festival on Feb.16. Her presentation will also include a performance from City Opera Vancouver’s soprano Catherine Thornsley with Roger Parton on piano.

dgee@postmedia.com

twitter.com/dana_gee

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