25 The Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story

A timely and deeply moving memoir of a Ukrainian family and the country’s tumultuous history.

In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands an elegant mansion known as the Rooster House, thanks to the two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying, and yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it, because the Rooster House was home to the secret police.

​Victoria grew up in Ukraine, moved abroad to the United States, then on to Europe. But in 2014, when Russian annexed Crimea and the landmarks of her personal geography—Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mariupol—were plunged into violence and tumult, she felt she had to go back. She had to visit her aging grandmother, and at the same time, she became obsessed with unraveling a family mystery spanning several generations, sparked by a line in her great-grandfather’s diary: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” It was an investigation that could only lead one place: to the Rooster House.

Inspired by the author's love for her family, and peopled by warm, larger-than-life characters who jostle alongside the ghostly absences of others, The Rooster House is at once a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a profoundly moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair.