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Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness – blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar – I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensiveness of death. “A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ … [has] … no meaning for him.” So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck.
