The soup of my childhood has become a symbol of Putin’s assault on Ukrainian land, culture and heritage, of his drive to plunder and obliterate Ukraine
On 25 February 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock and bouts of crying and doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realised that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities for a book I was working on, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch, a beet soup that Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own.
I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch – борщ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end, that’s a Yiddish addition – at least twice a week; after we emigrated in 1974, it signified for me the complicated, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, New York, where I live, a big pot made by my mother usually sat in my fridge. But who did have the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally personal.
