By Sharon Slettehaugh

The Rooster house: A Ukrainian Family Memoir by Victoria Belim.

Everyone finished the book and most liked it. The descriptions did a good job of setting the scene and conveyed how real the experience was for the author. The author grew up in the Soviet Union, emigrated at age 15, then returned to Ukraine to try to understand her culture of origin and family history. It also struck the group as an effort by the author to understand her father’s recent suicide. Belim learned that some of her relatives were displaced by the Chernobyl disaster and how the authorities downplayed what had happened. Throughout the book, she describes her relationship with a difficult uncle who remained a committed Soviet, her mother who was distant, and a grandmother with whom she was close.

A thread running through the book is Belim’s effort to understand what happened to her Uncle Nikodim, her father’s brother. No one in the family would talk about him and he simply seemed to have disappeared in the 1930s while fighting for a free Ukraine. After many dead ends, Belim finally learns, after digging through archives, that he was executed by the KGB. People living in Ukraine still seemed to be under the fear of Soviet reprisals and so even now, would not mention him or what had happened.