Union, New Jersey, matters in the book as a space of temporary removal rather than permanent escape. In Hrvoje Dundovic’s apartment, Rob Peace can step outside the pressures of his neighborhood, share food and drink with friends, and imagine a journey toward a different social and emotional landscape. The location becomes the point from which his Croatian trip takes shape, linking an ordinary suburban home to Rob’s recurring desire to move beyond the identities and obligations attached to East Orange.

Setting and Distance

Union lies about forty-five minutes west of East Orange, far enough away to alter the atmosphere of Rob’s visits without severing his connection to home. Hrvoje lived there with his wife, Marina, in an apartment, while remaining ambivalent about New Jersey and longing for his home country. His job with a Croat-based shipping company enabled him to travel back often, so the apartment carried a dual quality: it was physically in New Jersey but socially and imaginatively connected to Croatia.

That distance gave Union a particular value for Rob. Rather than always bringing Hrvoje into the neighborhood, Rob would visit him in Union and seemed glad to get out of East Orange for an evening. The movement between the two places was not presented as a clean break. It was a repeated crossing between the world Rob knew most intimately and a quieter domestic setting where he could temporarily loosen its demands.

A Refuge for Friendship

Hrvoje occasionally drove the half mile from Union to Interstate 280 after midnight to visit the Burger Boyz on Smith Street, despite knowing from experience that the trip was unsafe. Rob, in turn, came to Union for evenings at Hrvoje and Marina’s kitchen table. The visits involved grappa, questions about Croatia, and the relaxed intimacy of old friends; after drinking, Rob would sometimes fall asleep on their couch.

These gatherings preserved a bond formed in East Orange while changing its surroundings. Union allowed the friends to recall high school and maintain their camaraderie without reproducing the entire neighborhood environment around them. The apartment was therefore neither an abandonment of the past nor a return to it. It was a place where the past could be carried into a different setting, with less immediate exposure to the risks and territorial pressures that shaped life in Rob’s old neighborhood.

The Croatian Connection

The conversations in Union gradually produced the idea that Rob would accompany Hrvoje on one of his trips home. The plan emerged from repeated evenings rather than from a single dramatic decision: Rob listened to Hrvoje and Marina discuss their homeland, returned to the apartment, and became increasingly drawn toward seeing it for himself. Union thus functions as the narrative threshold for Rob’s later journey to Croatia.

The destination offered a striking contrast to the social conditions associated with Rob’s life in New Jersey. In Pula, he encountered a town of about sixty thousand people with ancient stadium ruins, little visible racial hostility, minimal crime, and residents who approached him with curiosity rather than suspicion. The trip’s appeal was intensified by Lana Kasun, Marina’s cousin, whom Rob loosely regarded as a girlfriend. Yet the possibility of that journey begins in the more modest setting of Union, where an apartment, a kitchen table, and conversations over grappa open onto a radically different imagined future.

Narrative Significance

Union represents one of the book’s recurring in-between spaces. Rob does not simply remain in East Orange, but neither does he fully escape its history; he moves through adjacent places, friendships, schools, workplaces, and international destinations, repeatedly testing whether a different environment can produce a different self. Union is important because it makes that movement visible in miniature.

The location also complicates any simple opposition between home and elsewhere. Hrvoje’s apartment is itself inhabited by someone who longs for another country, while Rob uses it as a temporary retreat from the neighborhood he knows. The result is a layered geography of belonging: East Orange remains the source of friendship and memory, Union becomes a hospitable interval, and Croatia becomes the next horizon. Union’s significance lies in the fact that the horizon is reached through ordinary social ties rather than through a sudden act of departure.