The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir – Belim Victoria (2023)

In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It does not look horrifying, yet when Victoria was growing up there in the 1980s, her great-grandmother took care to avoid walking past it. In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that had been a haven during her childhood. Just before the trip, she discovered her great-grandfather’s diary, with one page marked by a single deeply scored line: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” She had never heard of this uncle, and no one, especially her grandmother, seemed willing to discuss him. Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it. After years of navigating Ukraine’s post-Soviet bureaucracy, travelling to tiny ruined villages and speaking with wizened survivors of that era, her winding search led her back to the place she had always known it would: the Rooster House and the dark truths hidden in its basement. Inspired by the author’s love for her family and filled with warm, larger-than-life characters alongside the ghostly absences of others, this memoir is both a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair.