In ‘Robust Roots,’ Russia’s Invasions Cannot Kill Ukrainian Cooking

In 2025, after greater than three years of struggle and occupation in Ukraine, a significantly better query is that this one: Why do Ukrainians resist Russia so fiercely?

Most of the solutions may be present in Olia Hercules’s great new memoir, Robust Roots, which examines Ukraine’s latest historical past by means of the prism of her kin’ experiences.

Hercules is a celebrated, London-based chef and native of the Russian-occupied Kherson area, and meals performs a central position in Robust Roots. It’s not a culinary historical past, nevertheless, however a narrative targeted on sensation—the brilliant, vibrant really feel of particular locations, deadlines, wealthy tastes, lists of substances that learn like poetry. The main points of her prose are dizzying, from the “fractal patterns” of well-known Ukrainian sunflowers to “thunder scratching its stomach” towards the manufacturing facility buildings of Ukraine, which has each a “pure magnificence” and is an “industrial behemoth,” she writes.

Olia Hercules demonstrates her cooking expertise whereas interviewed by Hersha Patel in the course of the ONBlackheath Pageant in London on Sept. 10, 2016.Lorne Thomson/Redferns

The central theme of Robust Roots is life itself, the will to dwell and persist, which stands in stark distinction of the Russian state’s celebration of wonderful dying and Russia’s apocalyptic, hysterical insistence that the world should bow to it, or else die in a burst of nuclear fireplace. (As a international coverage analyst, I keep that this can be a bluff, however one which tells you one thing terrifying about Russia itself.)

Ukrainians, as Hercules will present you, are merely not like Russians relating to their politics and the ideology that drives mentioned politics. They’re too in love with life, whilst Ukrainian lives proceed to be snuffed out and maimed by Russia’s creaking struggle machine.

In recounting the historical past of her household, Hercules paints a vivid image of repressions and deportations, of human beings bashed towards the rocks of historical past on the whims of no matter psychopath, from Nicolas II to Stalin to Putin, was in management in Moscow.

The memoir is a litany of tragedies, however it’s by no means bitter. As Hercules tells the story of her maternal grandmother, Liusia, she states, “if she was given an opportunity to dwell her complete life once more, and if there was no different approach however to repeat it precisely because it was, she would do it. She would dwell her life as soon as extra, she would endure the horrors once more, if solely she additionally had the possibility to dwell by means of all the nice moments, too. She liked life so fiercely.”

Members of the Territorial Protection Forces, a assist pressure to the Ukrainian military, have dinner after workouts close to Bucha, Ukraine, on July 13, 2022.Sergei Supinsky/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Liusia and her household suffered compelled exile and poverty, the mass famine of the Holodomor, and the phobia of Stalinism. However she didn’t permit it to darken her coronary heart, or to bitter her hearty cooking—actual Ukrainian delicacies, not the tasteless gruel imposed by the Soviets. As Hercules notes, the Soviet Union stripped native delicacies of its aptitude and style throughout the board, with strictly imposed guidelines for all substances, together with seasoning, and a joyless strategy to assembly one’s dietary wants that bordered on punishment.

As a local of Ukraine myself, I discovered Hercules’s journey by means of her household historical past to be so acquainted that it flattened me. It’s not simply the historical past of what Stalin did then, and what Putin is doing as we speak, it’s each the uncooked grief and the enjoyment that accompany the narrative.

Like Hercules, I’m haunted by nightmares and sleep paralysis demons as we speak, as Russia’s struggle continues to rage on. I inform those who I wish to die already. I’m drained. Dwelling 1000’s of miles away from my place of origin, below a peaceable Western sky, I’m overwhelmed with survivor’s guilt.

However, additionally like Hercules, I’m hopeful in an offended approach. It’s a hopefulness borne out of affection for household and pals, our quaint traditions, our loud dinner events. No one actually events like Ukrainians, in my expertise.

Ukraine is a giant place, house to many alternative varieties of individuals. I’m initially from Kyiv and haven’t finished a lot hanging out within the Kherson area throughout peacetime; my information of it comes from my late father’s recollections of the area, the place he generally traveled for work, and his love for its native watermelons. He insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that it was an exquisite a part of the nation that the Soviets trampled with their idiotic insurance policies—just like the destruction of pure habitats—and their behavior of creating individuals dwell in low cost, ugly buildings.

Seeing my father’s phrases echoed in Robust Roots made me acknowledge the thread of indignation that unites Ukrainian households from totally different elements of the nation. Hercules devotes an ample quantity of house for explaining how Russification of the area below the Soviets drove vibrant native traditions to the periphery of existence and destroyed the panorama.

Putin, in fact, is now attempting to complete the job. His seemingly destruction of the Kakhovka dam, recounted within the e-book, is only one instance of the horrible nihilism that radiates from Moscow. How does one face a deranged enemy like that? With weapons, in fact, but additionally with remembering who you’re, and that you’re combating from what love.

Robust Roots is an exquisite train in preservation. The prose is a patchwork of ache and livid, enduring affection; whether or not she’s describing substances for a borsch made for her displaced dad and mom or delving into how the Ukrainian language treats the phrase “house,” Hercules is poignant and weak and defiant all of sudden.

“Why did I develop up believing Ukrainian literature was tedious and peripheral, however Russian literature was profound and globally necessary?” Hercules asks at one level—a query that many people within the diaspora have additionally requested, with disgrace and confusion in our hearts. “Why did we use Ukrainian language in a pejorative approach?”

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Generations, the e-book makes clear, weren’t solely taught however compelled to take action. The wages of disobedience had been violent dying at worst and exile to the margins of society at finest. The identical is being finished by Russians in Ukraine’s occupied territories as we speak.

The e-book asks, how dare they? And likewise: Who cares about them, after we are who we’re? Pour one other spherical and inform one other story. Face the darkness and stay your self as a lot as you’ll be able to.

There’s a lesson right here for anybody and everybody who contemplates darkish occasions. These occasions name for excessive bravery, sure, but additionally excessive grounding, a grip of historical past as powerful as any roots. As Hercules’s brother Sasha, who volunteered for the struggle effort instantly after the full-scale invasion, instructed her, “If we miss this second, we’ll by no means shut this circle.”