The New World as an Imagined Escape and Fresh Start

The New World as an Imagined Escape and Fresh Start takes shape as both a concrete proposal and a promise of personal reinvention. Velvele imagines leaving an aging, constricting empire for a new life across the ocean; Stefania Tchornenko imagines making that departure meaningful through food, work, and the possibility of loving on her own terms. The plan is strikingly specific, but the ending complicates its promise: even amid a house fire, Stefania’s envisioned future remains bound to Adèle Anger, whom she hopes her cooking will reach across the world.

The desire to leave

Velvele’s wish to go abroad predates his business proposal. He tells his mother that there is too little space and light where they live, that he wants to cross the ocean to the New World, test the earth’s roundness, and travel through wide-open spaces. His mother, who has fought to keep him from military service, hears the wish as another provocation and expects him to stay. Their disagreement gives the imagined departure a family cost: escape would mean leaving behind the mother who has protected and indulged her only son, not merely changing scenery.

When Velvele later speaks to Stefania, the urge to leave becomes a diagnosis of their surroundings. The city feels dark and narrow, the empire misshapen and swollen with age; old walls press in, and damp, foul-smelling cellars seem to make the whole place unlivable. He imagines a coming earthquake or volcanic eruption, even the earth splitting open into a vast chasm. The catastrophe is a premonition, not an event that the plan proves will occur. Its force lies in how it gives urgency and scale to the desire to escape: a world that feels ready to break apart can be left before it does.

A proposal built on practical details

Velvele presents departure as a partnership in which each person brings a different skill. He has saved a small capital to help them establish themselves, though he acknowledges that some should be left for his mother. He knows how to sell and arrange things and believes he can discern what people want. Stefania, he argues, can cook well enough to rival Franz Sacher’s restaurant in Vienna. Together they could become excellent partners, and the restaurant would bear her name.

The proposal is not left at the level of fantasy. Velvele says that he has ordered two tickets for the transatlantic Taormina, built by A. Stephen & Sons, and names March 13 as their departure date from Hamburg. The ship is designed for six hundred third-class passengers, so the imagined fresh start begins with an economical crossing rather than luxury. He adds that Stefania’s berth will be in the women’s section and stresses that he will not blame her if she refuses: he ordered the tickets without asking her first. The advance booking presses the possibility into the present, but his reassurance keeps the choice formally hers. He asks her to think it over; there is still time before departure.

Work, skill, and a life in her own name

The restaurant offers Stefania more than a destination. Velvele’s praise recalls the cream-vanilla éclairs whose aroma lingered above the market for days, even overtaking the smell of fish. He notices her intelligence and seriousness, her rough hands, and the labor behind the meals she prepares for her employers. His appeal connects her culinary talent to the possibility of changing the life in which she has been trained to serve others. Leaving, in this vision, would mean forgetting that training and beginning to live for herself.

At the same time, the plan does not erase the work of cooking; it gives that work a different setting and a different claim to recognition. Stefania imagines raspberry, blueberry, and strawberry cakes, along with meat, fish, and stuffed eggs, potatoes, mushrooms, and tomatoes. People would come to eat, enjoy the food, and bring their relatives and friends. The growing number of people she feeds would carry her cooking outward through travel and across the ocean. Where the household has confined her culinary labor to service, the restaurant bearing her name would make it public, chosen, and economically consequential.

The imagined crossing and its unresolved destination

Stefania later returns to the plan as a future she expects to share with Velvele. Recalling Ernest Thorn’s gift of a paper boat, she imagines herself sailing among the ocean waves with Velvele, leaving from Hamburg aboard the Taormina. The details recur—the ship’s builder, its third-class capacity, and the women’s section—so the departure is not a vague wish but a rehearsed future, held in the mind with the shape of a route and a place aboard.

Yet the imagined life across the ocean remains joined to Stefania’s attachment to Adèle. As a fire surrounds her, she repeats the restaurant plan and pictures the meals she will make. The people who eat her food will bring others; people filled with her love will encounter Adèle, kiss her hand, and smile at her child. Stefania imagines her love reaching Adèle even at the far end of the earth, like the globe in Doctor Anger’s study. The New World thus becomes a space for expansion without emotional separation: Stefania can picture distance, travel, and a livelihood in her own name, but she also pictures the fruits of that life continuing to serve Adèle.

Promise, catastrophe, and contradiction

The language of a fresh beginning stands beside the immediate destruction of the fire. As Stefania imagines a future beyond the ocean, Felix descends a ladder through a burning house and reaches the entrance door; the railway firefighters and those from Kniahynyn-Colonia are already on their way. Stefania holds Adèle close. The escape to another continent is therefore envisioned at the edge of a present emergency, not after the evidence has established that the household has safely emerged from it.

The plan’s emotional contradiction is clearest in Stefania’s imagined restaurant. Its work would be hers, its name hers, and its customers drawn to the food she makes. But the love she imagines circulating through that food is still directed toward Adèle. Stefania calls that love solid, unfailing, and eternal, comparing its permanence to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—the very old order Velvele describes as swollen with age and ready to collapse. The comparison gives the dream its unresolved edge: she imagines building a new life beyond the empire while measuring her own constancy against its supposed immutability. The New World promises movement and self-making, but the ending does not confirm either the voyage or a completed break from the attachments that define Stefania’s imagined future.