From Electric Lit:
Journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel Your Presence Is Mandatory is a poignant look at the reverberating effects of war through the story of a Ukrainian World War II veteran’s struggle to hide a damaging secret for the sake of his family.
Vasilyuk’s book begins with death—the first chapter featuring a family at the grave in Donetsk, Ukraine of main character Yefim Shulman, paying their last respects. Shortly afterwards, his wife finds a letter in his belongings addressed to the KGB, a confession that launches the family to reconsider the man they thought they knew. The novel then takes the reader back to Yefim as a young soldier in Stalin’s army stationed in Lithuania in 1941, shortly before Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union. Yefim’s experience as a soldier left him with a secret he was so afraid to reveal, even to his own family, that he took it to his grave.
The book skips between Yefim’s experiences serving in Stalin’s army and the remainder of his post-war life in Ukraine, even extending 7 years after his death to the beginning of Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the start of war in Donetsk. Your Presence Is Mandatory is a timely look at survival that will make you question how wars, both past and present, shape future generations.
I interviewed author Sasha Vasilyuk over the phone about the discovery of her grandfather’s letter to the KGB that change her family narrative about who he was.
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Katya Suvorova: Sasha, you’ve talked about how, after your grandfather’s passing, your grandmother and aunt found a real-life secret letter that your grandfather wrote to the KGB that totally upended your family narrative about who he was. How did this letter inspire Your Presence is Mandatory?
Sasha Vasilyuk: My grandfather was a Jewish Ukrainian World War II vet, but he didn’t ever talk about the war. From the few things that I and the rest of my family knew, we thought of him as a war hero, because he survived from the first day of the war until the last day four years later. Given that WWII killed 27 million Soviet people, this made him seem like a brave and lucky soldier. But his letter, which was addressed to the KGB and written back in the 1980s, revealed a very different story. Imagine thinking of your grandpa as a star of Inglorious Bastards where Jewish soldiers take revenge on the Nazis and finding out he was more like The Pianist. The letter was a shock to my family, but I immediately thought: this is a novel. I wasn’t just interested in how he survived WWII, but also in why he’d kept it a secret his whole life. Interestingly, it took my grandma several months to tell me about the letter because she too wanted to keep his secret a secret.
KS: Why do you think your grandmother hid the letter from you?
SV: So the Soviet government punished and shamed those who survived the war in non-heroic ways. That shaming culture was so strong that even after the USSR fell apart, people who’d internalized that shame continued to feel it. I think my grandpa, who inspired the main character Yefim, didn’t tell us what really happened to him during the war first to protect us from the government and later because he was ashamed. When my grandmother and my aunt discovered his letter, they also felt ashamed. At least at first.
KS: So do you think they finally accepted that he was a victim and that’s what brought them to tell you?
SV: I think they realized their shame stemmed from decades of propaganda and of living under a regime of fear. And maybe they saw that hiding one’s past makes it easy for future generations—like me—to not know your family history, or even your national history.
KS: I was reminded frequently while reading your novel of the parallels between passages describing the destruction and occupation of Ukraine by Nazi Germany in World War II and contemporary news reports of the Russia invasion of Ukraine. With your family being from the Donbas, how did your personal experience with Russian occupation affect your characters?
SV: After my grandmother found the letter, I didn’t sit down to write this novel for the next 10 years, primarily because I couldn’t imagine writing about World War II. It felt entirely too daunting. I felt like I couldn’t imagine what it was like to survive a war, even if I’ve seen the movies, like we all have, and read other books. As somebody who was trained as a journalist, I couldn’t write about war until war broke out in my family’s town in the Donbas. This was in 2014 and I visited in 2016 when it was supposed to be safer.
There, I heard shelling. I saw bullet holes on every surface. I saw the way people scurried about and I experienced the fear of war. And only then did I feel like I could portray those feelings in my characters with any, you know, realism.
As far as how it affected my characters, what I was surprised by was how the war changed how my family identified themselves. They shifted from this sort of a general Soviet identity, where we’re all brothers, toward a more nationalistic identity that very clearly distinguished Ukrainians from Russians. Now that we have a full-scale invasion this shift in identity really took over the entire Ukraine. There have been so many essays on this subject and so many people in Ukraine talk about how they’ve been perceiving themselves very differently because of the war. So when writing my characters, I thought about how war changes our identity and our relationship to home, to the state, to the enemy. Those things were all interesting to me.
Link to the rest at Electric Lit