The Rooster House: A Ukrainian Family Memoir eBook

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Author : Victoria Belim
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : 'Wild Swans for Ukraine ... rich and magnificent' Bookseller 'A paean to hope and home. I loved it and it will haunt me' HELEN MACDONALD 'Marvellously vivid and often heartbreaking... I read it in a single enthralled sitting' MIRANDA SEYMOUR 'An instant classic: an essential book in these darkening times' SOPHY ROBERTS 'Compelling, beautifully written... an insight into the complexity of Ukraine's history' MERIEL SCHINDLER In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with 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. In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather's diary, one page scored deep with the single line: 'Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.' She had never heard of this uncle and no one - especially her grandmother - seemed willing to tell her about him. Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story, and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it. In the end, after years of sifting through Ukraine's post-Soviet bureaucracy, after travelling to tiny, ruined villages and speaking to the wizened survivors of that era, her winding search took her back to the place she had always known it would - to the Rooster House, and the dark truths contained in its basement. 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.

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Author : Victoria Belim
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : 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: 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.

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Author : Victoria Belim
Genre : Ukraine

Summary : Traditional Chinese edition ofThe Rooster House: My Ukrainian Family Story, A Memoir

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Author : Victoria Belim
Genre : Biography & Autobiography

Summary : Entrelaçando fatos do passado para compreender o presente e a si mesma, Victoria Belim faz de Minha Ucrânia um testemunho do poder do amor e da esperança em tempos difíceis. Nascida da união de uma ucraniana com um russo, Victoria Belim cresceu acostumada com a diversidade e se adaptou facilmente quando emigrou para os Estados Unidos, aos 15 anos. Já adulta e morando em Bruxelas, em 2014 Belim acompanhou pelos noticiários a escalada dos conflitos entre Ucrânia e Rússia e percebeu a urgência de saber mais sobre seu país de origem — e, por consequência, sobre si mesma. Uma vez chegando na casa da família, em Bereh, onde a avó, Valentina, ainda morava, as memórias de infância correndo pelo pomar e ouvindo as histórias dos bisavôs ressurgiram com força. Combinada com a vontade de reencontrar suas raízes estava a curiosidade de descobrir o que teria acontecido a um tio-avô desaparecido na década de 1930. Por que ninguém falava sobre Nikodim? Como uma pessoa poderia simplesmente desaparecer? Enquanto reunia pequenas pistas ao longo das diversas viagens que fez à Ucrânia, Belim precisou enfrentar a realidade de uma burocracia pós-soviética que ainda permeava departamentos governamentais e a insistência familiar em não falar sobre o passado. Ao ter acesso, enfim, aos arquivos do tio-avô, Belim não apenas compreendeu a força das histórias, como também que mentiras e verdades são questões de perspectiva e que acontecimentos passados podem afetar profundamente o presente de inúmeras pessoas. Minha Ucrânia apresenta a vida de quatro gerações de uma família multicultural e retrata a complexidade histórica de um país e um povo marcados por conflitos e desigualdades, mas também por esperança e cultura. "[...] Um livro cativante que acompanha, com riqueza de detalhes quatro gerações de uma família [...] e contextualiza a atual Guerra da Ucrânia, sem deixar de refletir sobre cultura, arte, geografia e as fronteiras idiomáticas, e como tudo isso é capaz de afetar nossa complexidade particular." — The Bookseller "Parte livro de memórias, parte suspense [...] este retrato de uma família ucraniana fragmentada mostra o quanto as feridas podem ser profundas e que curá-las significa ser capaz de superar décadas de silêncio, segredos e negação." — The Guardian

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Author : 維多利亞•貝林姆
Genre : History

Summary : 「我們家族應該對蘇聯感恩戴德。」 ★未出版即全球銷售16國版權★ ★The Bookseller 當月選書★ ★《鷹與心的追尋》作者海倫．麥克唐納推薦★ 2014年俄烏關係白熱化， 一場伯侄之間的意識形態之爭， 引領作者回到烏克蘭外婆家的櫻桃園， 牽引出一個家族橫跨四代紛雜的歷史記憶與認同 2014年俄羅斯展開對烏克蘭的軍事行動，也是在那一個歷史時刻，作者維多利亞•貝林姆的電腦螢幕閃現著一則訊息：「我們家族應該對蘇聯感恩戴德。」而這訊息來自她曾因蒐藏披頭四唱片，在蘇聯統治烏克蘭時期鋃鐺入獄的伯父。 出生於烏克蘭的兩個世代面對同一場戰爭，卻是截然不同的兩種詮釋。對作者而言，蘇聯象徵的是車諾比核災、專制統治與大饑荒。對她的伯父而言，蘇聯不僅是核工程與航空科技的先鋒，更是保護烏克蘭免於納粹統治的軍事強權。 這場由著政治立場相左的爭執，以及曾祖父日記記下的一名失蹤家族成員，帶領作者回到離開十年以上的故鄉波爾塔瓦的櫻桃園。在塵封的照片、日記及藏書中，以曾祖父母所經歷的歷史事件為本，走訪烏克蘭社會主義時代的祕密警察單位「公雞之家」、各地檔案室、博物館及祖厝，試圖拼湊不斷消失中的家族歷史，解開四個世代面對政權轉移的立場歧異及糾結。 「哀悼一個地方，比哀悼一個人還難。」曾經對作者而言，俄軍侵略克里米亞的新聞畫面，彷彿存在於老舊電影的灰色畫面。隨著一邊協助農務一邊穿梭於以列寧命名的無數街道，在破碎凌亂的檔案與歧異紛亂的歷史認同中，作者以一個家族的故事折射出一個「邊境之國」的歷史處境，並且在進行式的戰爭中，找回重新感受一個地方──一個未經戰火蹂躪的烏克蘭，一個離散的家族重新找回連結的可能。

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Author : Dalton Conley
Genre : Social Science

Summary : This vivid memoir captures how race, class, and privilege shaped a white boy’s coming of age in 1970s New York—now with a new epilogue. “I am not your typical middle-class white male,” begins Dalton Conley’s Honky, an intensely engaging memoir of growing up amid predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York’s Lower East Side. In narrating these sharply observed memories, from his little sister’s burning desire for cornrows to the shooting of a close childhood friend, Conley shows how race and class inextricably shaped his life—as well as the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. In a new afterword, Conley, now a well-established senior sociologist, provides an update on what his informants’ respective trajectories tell us about race and class in the city. He further reflects on how urban areas have (and haven’t) changed over the past few decades, including the stubborn resilience of poverty in New York. At once a gripping coming-of-age story and a brilliant case study illuminating broader inequalities in American society, Honky guides us to a deeper understanding of the cultural capital of whiteness, the social construction of race, and the intricacies of upward mobility.

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Author : Susan Viets
Genre : Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961-1989

Summary : Based on diaries, reporting notebooks, letters and memory, the author, a student turned journalist, tells of her adventures in Europe within a ten-year period (1988 to 1998) which included major historical and political change in countries such as Budapest, Bishkek, Chornobyl and Chechnya. She finishes her stories with an eyewitness account of Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004.