On the night of 30 October, I was sitting alone in a small train cabin somewhere between Przemysl and Kyiv. It had been about a week since Russia had started to strategically target Ukrainian energy infrastructure, to cause maximum suffering as the winter was approaching. Every morning, there was worse news – 20% of infrastructure damaged. Then 30%. Then 40%. The bombs and drones caused damage faster than Ukrainians could repair it, despite performing miracles with scarce resources while being in constant, mortal danger. Some equipment was impossible to repair and often almost equally impossible to replace, unless you were lucky to find the right make of autotransformer languishing in an old Lithuanian warehouse. The necessary machinery would take months to produce and transport and could be destroyed the next day in a Russian attack. It felt like a hopeless, unusually vicious circle.

So there we were, on our way to discuss with the Ukrainian government how and what the EU should do in addition to the things we were already doing. We had initially been told not to use any digital tools on the train, but our security detail seemed rather relaxed about it, so I was balancing my laptop on my knees, reading and rereading the words on the screen. The text was not, as one might have expected, about the energy equipment or the meeting with the energy minister. It was, however, about Ukraine. And war. The first sentence went: “Uncle Vladimir and I fell out a month after his namesake annexed Crimea.” On the slow, slightly wobbly train to Kyiv, I was translating a trial chapter from Victoria Belim’s The Rooster House.

It’s been almost a year since that night and the Estonian translation will be available next week (publishing moves slower than war). The Rooster House is a good book regardless of the context, but Russia’s war on Ukraine makes it a must-read in my view. The West is getting tired of the war: it no longer feels distasteful for some allies to use Ukraine in its domestic power struggles, elsewhere the governments are finding it difficult to rally the support they need to keep assistance going. New atrocities in Palestine and Israel demand – quite rightly – their own share of people’s attention, resources and emotional energy. It is ironic how one can be tired of a war one is not fighting, but I realise that sarcasm and anger are not helpful reactions in this regard.

What I believe can be helpful is reminding ourselves what is at stake and why. The Rooster House is not exactly a book about war, it’s not really a history book either, but you will know war and history better once you have read it. For many people, learning about the fate of countries works best if seen through personal stories, through the joys and tragedies of ordinary families. And this is exactly what The Rooster House provides: a microcosm, the tides of history made tangible. Victoria’s quest to learn about her great grand uncle, about her family, her country and herself is something everyone can relate to, even if not every part of it is familiar.

I hate when people summarise the plot of a book and call it a review – it is lazy and spoilery and just extremely annoying. But I understand that it’s useful to have the basics: the book starts with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the tensions that it creates in Victoria’s multicultural family. Inspired further by her great grandfather’s diaries that mention a brother who fought for free Ukraine and then disappeared, Victoria decides – after years of living abroad – to return to Ukraine, to reconnect to her grandmother and solve the puzzle of her great uncle’s disappearance. The titular Rooster House refers to the Soviet secret police building in Poltava, a key location in the story. If you go in without knowing much more, it reads almost like a thriller, albeit a literary one that is interspersed with lots of gardening, embroidery and Ukrainian village life.

There is a particular pleasure in reading this as an Estonian (the same goes, I assume, for many who are from the former USSR or the Soviet Block). We, too, have grandfathers taken by NKVD, family members who were sent to Siberia, someone we know who served in Afghanistan. We recognise the obsessive care for the garden, the stories that had many layers, the ubiquitous statues of Lenin and the buildings that were best not named. We have been marked not only by the war, but decades of living under a totalitarian regime. The book made me wonder, how much of what I took to be the unique character of my grandparents was, in fact, an expression of trauma (in the Soviet Union, trauma of course only referred to the physical; mentally speaking, you were either ‘normal’ or ‘insane’). I think of my determined, perfectionist maternal grandmother, who woke every day at 4am “so that she would have all the morning chores done by 6am” and my gentle grandfather, who rarely spoke about his 10 years in a Stalinist labour camp, could work harder than 5 average men combined and loved to drink Pepsi, a luxury in the eighties’ Estonia.

The Rooster House is sometimes a difficult read, but it is not bleak and the dry, somewhat absurdist humour will make you smile more often than you would expect. It is also nuanced and perhaps more gentle than would have been possible, if it had been written after 24 February 2022. And Victoria’s interest in Ukraine’s culture and crafts, her love for her family and the descriptions of ordinary people turn this into much more than a record of past and present horrors.

Finally, a disclaimer – I have been a fan of Victoria’s writing for many years and her friend (although not necessarily always a good one) for about a decade, since I moved to Brussels. I can, however, assure you, that I would not have spent every free moment over four months translating her book, if I had not believed that this book needs to be urgently read by as many people as possible. There are things I do for my friends simply because they are my friends, but translating a full book is not one of them. I hope you find time to read it, either in the English original or in whatever translation is accessible to you.

If you have already read it, leave your (spoiler-free) thoughts below!

The launch event for Kukemaja, the Estonian translation of The Rooster House, will take place on 30 October in Tallinn, in the Viru Keskus Rahva Raamat store. Victoria will be there in person and we will start our conversation at 5pm. If you are in Estonia, please join us, I can guarantee that it will be interesting!