The Briar Club

The chapter includes recipes for Arlene’s Candle Salad and Reka’s Haluski.

Reka is a bitter 71-year-old Hungarian refugee who works with Grace at the Smoot Library, shelving books. Unbeknownst to the other boarders, she is also a talented avant-garde artist who taught in Berlin before World War II. Reka sadly thinks her glory days are past her: “She wasn’t the woman she’d once been, downing a bottle of absinthe and a bottle of vodka at a cabaret and waking up the following morning bright-eyed and ready to rip apart thirty-plus Dadaist student still lifes” (121).

Once a month, when she has the money to spare, Reka takes a three-hour train ride to New York and back again to attend an art gallery showing. She knows many gallery owners and is aware of the latest trends in the art world. This is her only remaining pleasure in life. When she and her late husband were forced to flee Germany, they lost everything, and neither one could find jobs suited to their training in the land of opportunity. Otto had been a journalist who could only find work as a janitor. Reka shelved library books instead of teaching or creating art.