Souccot

Souccot is recalled through the Baumel family’s use of a retractable-roof veranda as a festival booth, a detail that later helps explain the imaginative origins of Petro’s house. The festival’s temporary, sky-facing shelter becomes an architectural memory: an everyday domestic space opened to the heavens, then echoed in the house Petro builds for Adèle and Stefania.

The Baumel Family’s Festival Shelter

The Baumels’ shop sold fabric and ready-made clothing, while the family’s seven daughters and their mother wove lace. The household’s veranda had a ceiling made with retractable trays; during Souccot, those trays could be opened so the veranda served as the family’s booth. Its ordinary function was thus transformed by the festival into a temporary dwelling connected to the sky.

The recollection places this practice within a home whose furnishings and craft carried distinct cultural associations. The family’s interior included substantial Hutsul-style furniture, carved and inlaid with decorative patterns, contrasting with Adèle’s more familiar tastes. The veranda’s adaptable ceiling adds another dimension to this material world: a building element designed not only for everyday use but also for a recurring religious observance.

From Festival Architecture to Petro’s House

After Adèle married Petro, and after Doctor Anger’s death, Petro visited the Baumels to study the veranda ceiling. He was then beginning to build the house that would become a conspicuous landmark in the street. Mr. Baumel approved Petro’s interest and told him that people must remember the stars. The remark supplies a direct link between the festival shelter and Petro’s architectural imagination.

Petro’s house carries that recollection into a permanent domestic form. Its salon has a colored-glass ceiling that he describes as a map of the starry sky: blue panes divided by copper, with gold and transparent glass forming constellations, planets, and a comet with a fiery tail. Sunlight scatters fanciful patches across the room, while moonlight makes the ceiling seem ghostly. Unlike the Baumels’ veranda, whose opening to the sky is seasonal, Petro’s ceiling fixes a celestial image inside the house.

Memory, Modernity, and the Meaning of Home

The novel places the house amid Stanislaviv’s architectural transition: older wooden dwellings burn or collapse as modern brick houses, decorated with towers, arches, mosaics, and colored glass, become common. Petro’s building shares some of those contemporary materials, yet its unusual forms make it seem like a mirage or an unexplained magic trick. The memory of the Baumel veranda gives this strangeness a history in observed craft and domestic practice rather than treating it as mere ornament.

The recalled ceiling also anticipates the novel’s account of objects as extensions of thought and feeling. Petro’s house is not simply a response to practical needs; its forms and decorations express questions and sensations. Souccot matters to this history not as an abstract symbol but as the concrete occasion on which a retractable ceiling made the stars part of home life—and gave Petro an architectural model for carrying that celestial attention into a modern house.