Review: "The Rooster House" by Victoria Belim

The Rooster House by Victoria Belim
Edition published June 2023 via Abrams Press
★★★★

I made the final revisions to The Rooster House in August 2022, writes Belim in the opening of the book, and when rereading the manuscript against the backdrop of recent news from Ukraine, I knew that I wouldn't have been able to write this book now. It captures a particular time and place and a certain innocence, because even in 2014 I would not have imagined the events of 2022. (loc. 31*)

Belim was born and raised in Ukraine, shifting easily between city and country, Russian and Ukrainian, as the situation dictated. As a teenager, she and her family moved to the US; as an adult, she made her home in Belgium. Ukraine slipped out of her grasp, a place she meant to return to but usually didn't. And then, with the start of the Donbas war in 2014, return suddenly became paramount: to understand Ukrainian history, her family history, her own history. A monthlong visit became a months-long visit became years of back and forth travel, building (and rebuilding) ties in Ukraine and dusting off her family history before it was lost to time.

They had no jewels passed down from illustrious forebears and no books of family trees. They knew of their distant ancestors only by virtue of their own existence. They left few traces. It was hard to accumulate belongings and uninterrupted history when one lived in a place referred to as 'the bloodlands', 'the borderland', or 'the frontier'. (loc. 347)

But here is history repeating itself: war was knocking on the door again. When Belim and her grandmother visited the small house where Belim's grandmother and great-grandmother lived while her great-grandfather was off at war, they found that the current residents had fled Crimea following Russian occupation. Belim's quest to understand her history came to be defined in part by a hunt for her great-uncle Nicodim, who had disappeared in 1937—gone not only in body but his name erased from family conversation.

There are a lot of names to keep track of in this book—names and places and events—but there's also just a lot of story, and I'm so glad Belim wrote this when she did; certainly she could have written a book later, but I can only begin to imagine how different things in much of Ukraine are now than they were in 2014 or 2019. War changes landscapes and family units and the lenses through which we read things. Belim's grandmother Valentina—with whom she spent much of her time on her trips to Ukraine over these years—is the standout heroine of the book, set in her ways yet with complexities that Belim was able to delve into over time.

Very much recommended to anyone who has been following Russia's invasion and the subsequent war in Ukraine, but it's also just a fascinating family history in its own right.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley. *Quotes may not be final.