Gabriella Bekes reviews 'The Rooster House'

The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir

Victoria Belim, Little Brown

4 stars

Born in Kyiv, writer/journalist Victoria Belim emigrated to the US at the age of 15. Despite her comfortable life in Chicago, she had a yearning for her motherland, an identity crisis, questioning who she was and where she came from. 

Having moved to Brussels, Belgium, she came across a note in her great-grandfather's diary that mentions his brother Nikodim, who vanished in 1937 “fighting for a free Ukraine”. She had never heard of Nikodim and this galvanised her return to Ukraine in 2014, hoping to find out more about her family's roots.

She went to the Ukrainian village of Bereh to stay with her grandmother Valentina, a tough woman who had little tolerance for Belim's digging into the past, preferring to work in her cherry orchard. But Belim was set on a pilgrimage to find out what happened to her uncle.

She travelled to ruined villages that still bore the harsh stain of the Soviet Union, with roads named after Lenin, statues of him in crumbling town squares, records offices with bored, unhelpful workers. Slowly she made friends and was amazed by the hospitality of people she met. She also learnt Ukrainian history, its cultural beauty, and about the unbelievable suffering of its people.

She finally went to the Rooster House in Poltava, a place people cross the road to avoid, the home of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka, NKVD and KGB. Here she finally got her answer.

Key figures are her great-grandmother Asya and great-grandfather Sergiy, who survived the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, the Red Terror and forced collectivisation. They married during the Holomodor, the great famine of 1932-1933 that killed 3-million in Ukraine, then part of the USSR. The couple survived the Great Purges of 1937-1939. Then came World War 2 and Sergiy, a diehard Bolshevik, went on to fight the Germans and lost a leg in battle.

This memoir is about the tragic history of Ukraine which continues to the present, a history of a people wedged between Russia and the West, constantly under threat of the Russian yoke. But it is also about family, proud traditions and a country of great beauty.

Belim's writing is powerful, transporting the reader into a place vivid with smells and images of incredibly beautiful landscapes. It's about ancestry and the importance of identity and knowing your place in the world. Highly recommended. — Gabriella Bekes

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