When Going Home Becomes a Fact-Finding Mission

THE ROOSTER HOUSE: My Ukrainian Family Story, by Victoria Belim

“When something of ours, something we took for granted as being ours, is destroyed before our eyes,” writes the Ukrainian-born journalist Victoria Belim, early in her absorbing memoir, “we are destroyed along with it.”

Belim makes this observation while watching the 2013 protests in her native country. In what came to be known as Euromaidan, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians flooded central Kyiv after then-President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an agreement with the European Union in favor of deepening Ukraine’s relationship with — and dependence on — Russia.

As she details in “The Rooster House,” Belim immigrated to the United States in 1994, when she was 15. After two decades in the U.S. and a move to Brussels, she finds “Ukraine had become a distant, unknown land” and she’s become “an expert at forgetting.” But as the news fills with footage of her “personal geography plunged into tumult,” her connection to her homeland is renewed.

She travels to Ukraine to visit her grandmother, Valentina, who lives in the home of Belim’s late, beloved great-grandparents, Asya and Sergiy, where the author spent childhood summers in the orchard and garden.

Before leaving Brussels, Belim learns for the first time of the existence of Sergiy’s brother when she happens upon a simple sentence in a journal of her great-grandfather’s: “Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.” When Belim asks family members about him, they either feign ignorance or give slippery answers.

“The mystery of Nikodim’s disappearance and subsequent amnesia on the part of my family disturbed me,” Belim relates. She’s determined to solve this mystery, and the journey to visit Valentina becomes a sort of fact-finding mission.

When the orchard, now under Valentina’s obsessive care, was Asya’s responsibility, it grew in the shadow of what the family called “the Rooster House” or “the Rooster Trap,” a reference to the mythical Firebirds painted on its walls.

Its purpose was anything but whimsical: The Rooster House was the local outpost of the many versions of Soviet state security agencies, from the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission, established in 1918, to the Committee for State Security, or K.G.B. “By any name,” Belim dryly notes, they were “the secret police.”

Indeed, locals “used to joke that the Rooster House was the tallest building in town, because even down in its basement, one could see all the way to Siberia,” and its looming presence instilled so much dread that Asya took detours to avoid passing it.

Though Belim wants to avoid the Rooster House, too, she can’t.

Belim’s quest to learn about Nikodim is filled with obstacles. What she eventually discovers is a destabilizing “mixture of lies and bits of truth” that brings her “not to the light, but deeper into the darkness.” The process also forces her, brutally, to acknowledge her own willful amnesia about her father’s 2011 death by suicide, a pain “so intense” that she “decided to forget him.”

After her father’s death, she and his brother, Vladimir, made a pact that they would talk about it only when she was ready. Though they have fallen out over her uncle’s strong pro-Russian sympathies, the process of confronting her grief leaves Belim eager to reconnect. Their eventual reconciliation heals old wounds but brings new pain.

Ultimately, Belim chooses to “embrace the past in its complexity,” she writes, “just as I embraced the future in its uncertainty.” Of course, Ukraine itself faces an uncertain future — although the author remains optimistic. Reading her book, it’s impossible to forget that however resilient the country may be, the pain currently inflicted will be felt for generations.

Anya Yurchyshyn is the author of the memoir “My Dead Parents” and numerous works of short fiction.

THE ROOSTER HOUSE: My Ukrainian Family Story | By Victoria Belim | 304 pp. | Abrams Press | $28