“The famine Valentina remembered vividly was the one after the second world war, which was devastating,” says Belim. Asya had seen people dead in the streets from starvation her daughter Valentina then survived a second famine.
Valentina had been born into famine in 1930s Ukraine, surviving because her mother Asya married her father Sergiy, who had a ration book. “It’s a place to plant seeds, a place of safety, a place of beauty and love.” “In Ukrainian culture and folklore, the concept of a garden is almost sacred,” says Belim. Her cherry trees, her potatoes, her tomatoes. Least of all Valentina, Victoria’s fierce grandmother, whose focus remained determinedly on tending her orchard. The beautiful red building had a terrible history, and nobody wanted to speak about it. People would take detours rather than walk past it - it was where citizens were disappeared, tortured, and killed. This was a vivid neo-baroque building in the nearby town of Poltava, originally built as a bank, but requisitioned by the security forces. Vanished without a trace, perhaps to the Rooster House.
She discovered her great grand uncle Nikodim, an ordinary citizen, had disappeared during the reign of Stalin. Victoria Belim, writer of The Rooster House. I wanted to share these stories, for people to know about it” - became something deeper. Every town, every region, is famous for some kind of artisanal work. What began as an exploration of her country - after years away, she was “blown away by the complexity of its culture, its arts.
But when the war first started in 2014, I was pushed to think, where do my loyalties lie? What am I? What makes me Ukrainian? Until then it was not so important.”īetween 20, Belim spent chunks of time revisiting the rural village of her childhood, and staying with her grandmother Valentina. That whole concept was quite foreign to me. “My mother is Ukrainian, my father Russian, my stepfather Belarusian, my stepmother Azerbaijani - we never had a focus on national identity. “I grew up in a very multinational family,” she tells me via Zoom. She speaks 18-20 languages - it varies, she says, depending on which ones she is using most. In 2013 she moved to Brussels with her British-Indian husband, where she works as a writer and translator. She grew up in central Ukraine, spending much time with her grandmother Valentina in the countryside, before moving to the US in her mid-teens. Belim is half Ukrainian, and half Russian.
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