My Madeleine (Millefeuille) Moment

My Madeleine Moment

Many of you will be familiar with Marcel Proust.

As a teenager, I was obsessed.

Proust, more than any other author (other than Thomas Mann, perhaps) was the reason I started writing fiction.

His words, but more importantly, his memories (real or imagined or blended, it may not matter) throughout his Remembrance of Things Past series, especially Volume 1, absolutely shook me to my core.

Not because it was wordsmithing.

It simply managed to reflect my inner reality magnitudes better than anything else I’d read up to then (again, with the possible exception of Thomas Mann’s work).

I was a crazy romantic as a kid - and well into adulthood, frankly.

Not that I’m totally on to some cynical stage, either.

Reading Proust made me feel that there was at least one other person in this world who understood me.

Never mind that he had lived and died many decades before I was born.

Feeling truly, fundamentally understood is perhaps the most under-rated joy that one can feel.

It’s rare, in general, but as an immigrant kid with a huge literary bent and overactive intellectual curiosity, it was something like a salvation in a sea of ignorance.

Why am I thinking of Proust in the middle of a war, you might ask…?

I truthfully don’t know.

It’s been ages since I felt anything remotely like this.

Sadly, but not surprisingly.

War is a massive bummer (LOL, nothing to laugh about).

Kids, mortgage, work, business, obligations.

They can — and do — turn even the greatest romantics and stubborn artists among us a bit coarse, a tad less than subtle, if not downright cranky, at times.

I keep it civil, more than most, I’d like to think.

Maybe it’s reading Hemingway.

Kidding, he was about the least romantic guy you can imagine, with his no-nonsense, crisp and concise reporting and writing from the war front.

Two days ago, despite having my sweet tooth taken away in the last few weeks do to all that plov (Bukharian lamb pilaf) I’ve been making and eating non-stop, I ventured down to the best bakery in the neighborhood here, Shemo.

These guys are maybe not 100% top Parisian something, but they really know their stuff.

So two days ago, I took a Baba au Rhum, but carefully eyed their Millefeuille.

Today, I went back and got the latter.

In Russian, we call this Napoleon cake.

You see, it was the first cake I remember eating as a child.

It was the cake my Mom made most at home, and also the first cake I remember Mom buying for me from the French bakery in our little town in Russia.

Yep, the French obsession has been in my system since a very early age.

No wonder that my wife is French, then.

[Oddly enough, I just realized that I ate lunch at the sushi place here, called… Napo. Yep, also after Napoleon.]

Weird. Anyways.

So I took out my Napoleon after 90 minutes of lugging it around campus and to synagogue.

Look, let me be clear.

Much as I love millefeuille, it’s been mostly disappointing.

I mean for many years.

In Russian stores, it’s far too many sheets of dough (no, still not 1000 sheets, no matter the French name) and far too much cream inside, with much too much sugar.

Even stranger, when I had it in Paris, it was delicious, but didn’t in any way recall childhood for me. Just a tasty delicacy.

And today, I open the box, taste the cream, and voila!

I tasted childhood.

As in, the EXACT same taste of cream, and the EXACT same taste of flaky dough as a 5 year-old.

My G-d, I didn’t think I was still capable of such sensations at 40.

Really, no drama, life has taken such reactions away from me, largely.

But apparently, not completely.

Here I was, sitting on a bench on the Technion campus, having that incredible memory of one of my first and most memorable - and memorably delicious - joy as a child.

I also recalled that for almost two decades before I started working here last summer, I would have semi-regular dreams of being on campus, of feeling the freedom to roam and explore and meet people and fall in love and taste new foods, without any thought given to money or future or prestige or judgment.

So here I was, on campus, having a moment like the hundreds and thousands I’d had as an undergrad on Penn’s campus.

No, of course I’m not an undergrad anymore.

The undergrads running around campus are literally half my age.

But I know that something here’s working.

Of course I quickly felt guilty for this “guilty pleasure” during a war, while soldiers and civilians are dying.

There is no room for such decadence and escapism in wartime, blah blah blah… 

But even Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, not being particularly prone to sentimentality or escapism, still has flashbacks and visions of being with his girlfriend in Madrid after the war is over.

The truth is, the madeleine/millefeuille moment passed very quickly, after only a few minutes.

As a child and then college kid, I would have been in a reverie maybe for an hour or more, maybe for a whole day or two.

But here I was, smiling to myself, thinking, still got it.

Maybe it’s connected to finishing teaching a class I’d taken over in the middle yesterday, Consumer Behavior.

A student who had never made it to class until this last session I gave managed to look me up before I closed the session and was astounded (why, I’m not sure) to see that I’d written a book and that I do all this other stuff.

She even offered to be my intern, which I basically laughed off, politely.

Either way, it’s good to feel an unexpected joy during such a stretch of darkness.

We’ll take every little bit we can get.

Enjoy the rest of your week, my friends.

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Wanna buy me coffee for some hard-hitting thoughts?

Go for it here. Much appreciated!. 

Oh, and tell all your friends, too 🙂 

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