In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, Victoria Belim determined to return to her homeland of Ukraine. In The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Story, Belim candidly shares her reunions, research into her ancestors, and immersion into the fraught history of the country of her birth. She completed her bittersweet memoir in 2022 during the Russian invasion, writing, "Ukraine's resilience makes me hopeful that it will emerge out of this war victorious."
As an American citizen living in Brussels, her "latent yearnings" to better know Ukraine heightened in 2014 with the Russian aggression. Belim was confused when her grandmother, Valentina, was initially casual about her visit, continuing to plant potatoes and whitewash tree trunks in her cherry orchard. "When you owe your existence to famine, you become branded with fear," Valentina explains, referring to the starvation of the 1930s. Defying a warning not to "disturb the past," Belim searches for a long-missing great uncle "to make sense of the present and to understand my roots." This leads her to the Rooster House, notorious site of several iterations of the secret police. She discovers that her great-grandfather's brother (said to have "died fighting for a 'free Ukraine' " in 1937) "disappeared" in the Rooster House during the Stalinist "Great Terror."
Belim unearths grim details of her family's painful history, but also finds "at its simplest... my sense of self and my belonging." A historical yet personal memoir, her story from places now familiar in news reports also heightens the sadness for a people once again victimized by a brutal war. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza