STRONG ROOTS

A Ukrainian long-term resident in Britain reflects on her embattled homeland.

“Call this book a complicated grief response, if you like.” So writes Hercules, whose parents lived in the besieged Kherson region of Ukraine, less than 45 miles away from Russian-controlled Crimea and the center of savage fighting over the past three years. One way of reaching back to her birthplace was to speak to the spirits of her deceased grandmothers, for, as she writes, “to me, a non-religious person, my family—including, maybe especially including, my deceased ancestors—has always been the most important, most sacred thing in the world.” Another means of connection over the miles was to cook traditional dishes, not always successfully; when she reunites with her refugee parents in Italy, offering them a meal of borsch, her father, disappointed with precooked beetroot and the lack of dill, grimly says, “Mum should give you some tips.” A forgiving Hercules goes on to explain key points of Ukrainian history and culture, knowledge of which, in her parents’ childhood, had been suppressed by the Soviet state in a process locally called movchanka, “the great hush,” in which there was, she writes, not just “The Unsayable” but also “The Unthinkable.” Fortunately, if daringly, her father rebelled against a system in which, Hercules’s mother explains, the state seemed impossibly huge, and the people—“a blurry, intangible concept”—seemed tiny. That process of subjugation, Hercules notes, did not begin with Lenin or Stalin but with Catherine the Great, whose army seized Crimea, deported native Tatars, and began the process of Russifying a region whose language is different enough from Russian, she adds meaningfully, that “the thing is, we Ukrainians understand Russians, but they don’t understand us.”

A thoughtful, valuable testimonial to what it means to be Ukrainian in a time of torment.