A Memoir of Ukraine Through the Family Tree

By now the therapeutic value of kneading bread dough is so well established as to be almost a cliché. But what of the psychic release from chopping cabbage?

- ALEXANDRA JACOBS

"I often say that if I could do nothing else except chop for the rest of my days, I would be happy," the chef Olia Hercules writes in Strong Roots, a memoir of her Ukrainian heritage.

Hercules lives in London, where she's worked for Ottolenghi, the chain of restaurant-delis that made vegetables sexier than steak, and has written several delightful, conversational cookbooks, with recipes for dishes like Soviet goose noodles and watermelon skin jam.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has fractured her family of origin. Her brother joined the Kyiv territorial defence forces. Her parents fled their home city of Kakhovka, where the destruction of the local dam in 2023 has been ecologically and economically devastating.

Strong Roots is its own kind of dam, against the rushing anguish of war and generational trauma.

Hercules' maternal grandmother, Liusia, who died at 84 in the early aughts, emerges as a formidable heroine. During "holodomor," Stalin's intentional famine of Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s, she was forcibly and most horribly "repatriated" with her siblings by cattle train to northern Russia. All of the terms for this are euphemisms.