CANR

• Your Presence Is Mandatory Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2024

1. Your presence is mandatory : a novel LCCN 2023936738 Type of material Book Personal name Vasilyuk, Sasha, author. Main title Your presence is mandatory : a novel / Sasha Vasilyuk. Published/Produced New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. Description 318 pages ; 25 cm. ISBN 9781639731534 (hardcover) 1639731539 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Sasha Vasilyuk website - https://www.sashavasilyuk.com/

  Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of the debut novel Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) about a Ukrainian Jewish WWII soldier and his family who reckon with his lifelong secrecy. The novel is longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel award and translated into six languages. In Italy, it became an instant bestseller.

  Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and a MA in Journalism from New York University. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, TIME, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle, The Telegraph, and Narrative. She has won several writing awards, including the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing and the NATJA award.

  Before becoming an author, she had founded a leading wedding PR company and the first coworking space in San Francisco. She also spent a year traveling alone around the world.

  Sasha lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

• CrimeReads -

  Sasha Vasilyuk: To the Insecure ESL Writer I Once Was
  On learning English and daring to be a novelist.
  April 24, 2024 By Sasha Vasilyuk
  VIA BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

  I grew up in the former USSR surrounded by books on shelves built by my grandfather. The books came in multiple numbered tomes – grey, brick red, pale green – and bore the names of the authors in gold lettering that glistened under the light of the lamp. Chekhov. Pushkin. Akhmatova. One collection – Tolstoy – numbered in 14 emerald-colored volumes. There were foreign ones too: the Brontës, Hemingway, London. It would be a while until I learned that such collections were a status symbol for the Soviet middle class and that they were very hard to come by. Back then, long before I became a debut author in the U.S., they were simply a backdrop – weighty and venerated.

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  Before I dared open one – in fact, before I even learned to read or write – I entertained myself by making up nonsensical rhymes. I loved that words could be used to build worlds. To make magic. But the words I heard adults around me use weren’t magical. They were strange, complicated, dry: synthesis, psychotechnical, methodology. My parents worked as psychologists and all their friends – and my potential role models – were psychologists too. Even Santa Claus, who came to our apartment one year, turned out to be my dad’s colleague who, after ho-ho-hoing, took off his white beard to drink vodka in the kitchen and talk shop with my dad. While I secretly wanted to grow up into someone who made magic with words, when adults leaned over to ask what I wanted to be, I dutifully said, a psychologist. Saying a writer – putting myself in the vicinity of the gods on our bookshelves – felt sacrilegious.

  After living in Ukraine, we moved to Moscow where, in third grade, a tall, assertive teacher with a booming voice walked into my Reading class. He announced that instead of Reading, where we’d been suffering through short, deadwood passages of Soviet-era textbooks, he had come to teach us Literature. Literature! I still remember how that sophisticated word – and the dignity with which he said it – cast a magic spell on my mind. I thought of the gold-lettered books back home. As the teacher teleported me from the boring textbooks toward the transcendent poetry of Pasternak, I knew I wanted to be part of this World of Literature.

  Within a couple of years, I was composing my own Russian poetry. On a long winter bus ride to school, I wrote a poem about Pushkin, which won an award in a school competition. When assigned to write a fairytale based on a real historical event, I wrote an animal-populated version of the 1991 putsch, a coup attempt that resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I stopped saying I’d become a psychologist and began to believe that I was on a path toward a literary future. I allowed myself to dream that I would become a novelist, with a gold-lettered tome of my own.

  Then, in the summer before seventh grade, my mother dropped a bombshell: we were immigrating to the U.S.

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  At 13, I found myself walking into an ESL class in a public middle school in San Francisco. No one there would care for a girl writing in Russian. My main purpose in life became mastering English and fitting into the strange and fraught new world of American teenhood. I’d studied English back in Moscow, but the proper British version in my old classes included no Californian slang or cultural references. Plus, there was the accent. I’ll never forget how the whole class giggled when my “can’t” came out like “cunt”.

  I learned the pledge of allegiance and the concept, drilled into me daily, that this was the best country on earth, that I was lucky to be here, and that to be American meant abandoning the past and reinventing yourself in this land of opportunity. I was, in the words of Emma Lazarus, “the wretched refuse” of my ancient homeland “yearning to breathe free.” What I heard behind the American welcome was: my homeland was lesser than, my language was unnecessary, and my past irrelevant. All those gold-lettered books that traveled with us to San Francisco were a shrine to my past. They would never be a gateway to my future.

  In high school, I took Psychology where I confirmed that I had no talent or interest in following in my parents’ footsteps. By the time I got to college, I’d decided to major in Comparative Literature. I might not have the language chops or cultural knowledge to become an American novelist, I reasoned, but at least I could immerse myself in the writing of others. My classes focused on international literature and, unsurprisingly, were much smaller than the those in the English department. I read Doctor Zhivago, learned about Futurism, where we studied Marinetti and Mayakovsky, and did an independent study project on Akhmatova’s connection to Italian literature. I was finally making use of the books my mom dragged across the ocean, though I also felt college years were an indulgence. No one would pay me to do any of this in the real world.

  Even if I were to write a novel, the very concept of “The Great American Novel” excluded me, I felt. Though by then I’d become a U.S. citizen, who was I to say anything about my adapted homeland? It didn’t help that I kept wondering what would have happened to me had I never immigrated. In that alternate universe, unencumbered by foreignness, was I becoming a young novelist?

  At 19, I landed a summer internship at a Russian-language newspaper headquartered in the Empire State Building. As I rode the elevator – up, up, up – for a moment I felt there was value in my native language after all and maybe, even in America, I could carve out some niche and become a real working writer.

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  My first assignment was to interview a Soviet émigré artist who made sculptural paintings using found objects. He was in his 40s and lived in a crowded studio apartment on the Upper East Side. Though his life didn’t seem glamorous, I admired that he was able to find himself as an artist in this new country and was jealous that his craft was free of language. As I was about to leave, he asked me what I wanted to be. When I told him, he said, “To be a writer, you first need to live a little.”

  Instead of seeing through his condescension and sexism, I accepted that I hadn’t lived enough real life stuff to say anything substantial. By my age, Hemingway had been injured in World War I. Chekhov had assumed full support of his bankrupted parents. Jack London had gone to Japan as a sailor, had ridden trains as a hobo, and was jailed for vagrancy in London. In comparison, my immigrant life was pretty conventional. I didn’t have the confidence to appreciate what I had already lived through: growing up in Russia during the brutal violence of the 1990s, coming to America, being separated from my father, losing my first love to a car accident, and having grandparents who’d survived the Ukrainian famine, World War II, and Stalin’s repressions.

  The artist confirmed what I had already internalized as an immigrant: the stories from my culture didn’t matter.

  For the next decade, I didn’t write fiction or poetry. Not a single creative word, in any language. I was convinced that I had to live a little, whatever that meant, and that I had nothing meaningful to offer to American readers except occasional articles about things happening in this country.

  It took ten years and a divorce that sent me to Moscow where I marched in the biggest wave of anti-Putin protests for me to see that maybe I had some things to say that could bridge my upbringing in Ukraine, Russia and America. The protests were followed by arrests and, soon, by an armed conflict between my two homelands. At the time, in 2014, the conflict was centered in my family’s hometown in Ukraine. The world didn’t yet know that soon it would grow into the biggest land war since WWII.

  But I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I had to stop being afraid that I hadn’t lived enough and that no one in the U.S. would care to read a story that happens in another place, another time, to other people. It took me almost three decades to go from ESL class to seeing value in my history and culture. I only wish I could tell my younger self not to wait, but to write while life happened. To practice the craft. To record the experience of living in an insecure, confused, immigrant body. And meanwhile, not to let those old, gold-lettered books gather too much dust.

  Sasha Vasilyuk
  Sasha Vasilyuk was born in the Soviet Crimea and spent her childhood between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at the age of 13. She has a MA in Journalism from New York University, and her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar, BBC, The Telegraph, Narrative, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. She has won several awards, including the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, NATJA award, and BAM/PFA Fellowship from UC Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco, California with her husband and children

• The Racket - https://theracketsf.com/home/anukhosla/sashavasilyuk

  0
  Apr 23
  INTERVIEW: Sasha Vasilyuk by Anu Khosla

  Your Presence Is Mandatory
  Sasha Vasilyuk
  Bloomsbury

  Interview by
  Anu Khosla
  Before reading Sasha Vasilyuk’s first novel, I could’ve told you almost nothing about the role of the USSR in World War II. I could’ve told you that the Russians had fought on the side of the allies, but beyond that I couldn’t say much. It was only in the reading of her book that I realized the depths of my own ignorance. It was only in its reading that I realized how little I, as a result of the first ignorance, understand about today’s Russia, and the current war in Ukraine.

  Your Presence is Mandatory is the story of Yefim, a Ukrainian Jew who went to fight for the USSR in Germany and somehow made it back alive. You’ll have to read the book to find out how he survived, and when you do find out, you’ll know much more than his family ever did. The story weaves in and out through Yefim’s travails in Germany, and shows, movingly, the impact all Yefim’s secrets would have on his family for generations to come.

  On Super Tuesday 2024, amidst all the chaos, Sasha sat down with me to discuss her novel.

  Anu Khosla: Yefim, your protagonist, feels very much like a cat with nine lives. Is the reason he is able to survive so much because he's lucky or because he's good at lying?

  Sasha Vasilyuk: Maybe it's important to know that the character of Yefim is based on a real person, on my grandfather, and that he indeed survived all the things that are in the book. He even survived one more crazy thing that we decided to take out. There was a chapter where he, also true of my grandfather, was lost alone in Siberia and had to wander for multiple days, and somehow came out without a scratch. So I thought about this question of luck versus lying a lot. I think they're both part of the survival. And I think there's a third part where he has some sort of ability to navigate situations, often using humor or finding a way to use language to get what he wants. It's a mix of things, but I do think luck did play into it.

  I did some research on what kind of people survived World War II versus not. There are some trends that have been documented. It's a mix of having hope but not too much hope. If you have too much hope, you're constantly disappointed. If you have no hope, you just die, basically. You can't sustain it. There is some spiritual sustenance that is needed. And so staying in the middle was the way people survived. The second aspect is having friends who support you, so I gave him a friend. That friend’s vaguely based on a person, but I know nothing about this person. I used the real name of somebody who was mentioned by my grandfather in the letter that I found on which this entire novel was based.

  AK: There is a part where Yefim shares a bit more of his story with one member of the family. Was this story something that you knew or something that you discovered about your grandfather? How much of it was hidden from you versus something you had to research and find out?

  SV: The novel is based on a two page letter that was my grandfather's confession to the KGB that my grandma discovered after he died. The opening chapter begins with the character of a widow, named Nina, who then finds this letter. It is pretty close to exactly what happened. I personally did not know about the letter for multiple months. Once my grandma and my aunt read this letter, it completely changed their understanding of who my grandpa was. And mind you, my grandparents were married for, like, over 50 years. It changed my aunt's understanding of her father.

  Once you learn something new, you then replay the past, and all of a sudden, you reinterpret the past very differently. So this was happening, but they were both afraid and ashamed to share this information with anyone else. Even now my Aunt doesn’t feel comfortable talking about it to some of her friends. I think that's hard to understand for Americans, and this was one of my biggest challenges, explaining the culture of shame that surrounds certain fates that some people had during World War II.

  Whether you were a prisoner of war, whether you were a forced laborer, or you just lived, let's say, in Ukraine, during the occupation of Ukraine, all of these things –– though none of them were your fault –– were then turned against you after the war ended. There's a lot of prejudice against all of these people. They numbered millions, and most of them never talked about it, hid it if they could, or just never discussed their past with their family. Once I learned about this letter and what was in it, I was interested in the story itself, how my grandfather, who was also a Jew, survived in Germany for four years. But maybe even more than that, not how he hid it, but what he felt hiding it. What possessed him to spend the rest of his life, 70 more years, 60 more years, hiding this from people who clearly loved him? I think that was the more interesting question to explore.

  AK: I'm curious about the experience of navigating this with your family, given that they have some reservations about sharing this letter. How did you handle that?

  SV: This book will not, at least for now, be published in Ukraine or in Russia for two different reasons. In Ukraine, it’s because they are only buying escapist fiction right now, and I can't blame them. In Russia, it’s because this book just can't exist there, it breaks too many laws.

  The war today in Ukraine, it completely changed my understanding of World War II and Soviet culture, of the secrecy and silencing that my grandpa represents, and what role that played in the situation we have today. It’s important to tell stories that have been hidden away. Russia’s crazy ass president uses the past to tell his version of events and then uses that version of events to justify the war.

  World War II is told in this way: it's a trauma, which is true. 27 million Soviet people were killed. And it's kind of a unifying trauma. So you can use this idea to unify everybody behind it. And also, because USSR won World War II but didn't really get that much credit from the rest of the world –– and the credit has diminished with the years –– there's a kind of resentment mixed with pride. It's like, “we won that war, and if you fuck with us again, we will win it again.” You take this macho feeling mixed with trauma and you can do a lot with it. And Putin is doing a lot with it, he's bringing the narrative of World War II to help convince his citizens to support this war. And many people don't know a lot of the gray area, don't know that Soviet Union was really terrible toward its own citizens, that it often punished innocent people who survived Nazi Germany and then went back home. Soviet powers often would take them and send them to the gulag, to their own camps, for multiple years. Or at the very least, would prevent them from getting good jobs, from going to university. There are so many punishments, and they had to carry this mark in their record for the rest of their lives and be too ashamed to talk about it. It was actually almost as bad as Nazi Germany was toward its own people. That changes your understanding of yourself, of your people and their capacity for evil, which now is surprising a lot of Russians. They think, oh, wait, we are now the fascists who are killing our neighbors.

  AK: Within the American audience you're writing for, there are people that have Soviet backgrounds who are American, and then there are people, like me if I am honest, who are very uneducated about this history. And yet, right now, Russia and Ukraine are in the news in a big way. What are the considerations you had to take when you were writing this particular book for American audiences?

  SV: This was a constant balancing act because I wanted this book to be accessible enough for people who don't know that much about that history, and yet be readable and interesting and new to people from that culture. Luckily, my writing group is full of American writers, and the questions they ask me along the way help me calibrate what they know and what they don't. You often assume when writing about your own culture that other people know more than they do. And so it was really helpful to have that check. I was almost more worried about the Soviet readers because it feels to me that this book is more entertainment for Americans, but it touches the hearts and minds of people there and could potentially change their view of their history. That's a lot to carry. It's a lot of weight. So just as with my writing group and with the American readers, I did have some beta readers who were from Soviet Union, but of different generations.

  I began writing this book before the full scale invasion in the Russia-Ukraine War began. The earliest version of the conflict began in 2014, in the city where my family lived, where I spent every summer for my whole life. I visited in 2016, but didn’t begin writing the book until after that; partly because I never felt I could write about war. World War IIis just the most written about subject, and yet not often from the Soviet perspective. There's so much history there. There's so much pressure there. And I'm a girl. What am I doing writing about a male soldier in World War II? I was worried, because I’m trained as a journalist, that I wouldn’t be able to get it right. Not just the facts, which you can research, but what it feels like to be in a war.

  When I went to the Donbas to visit my family in 2016, I saw and heard what war feels like. That gave me confidence to be able to transport my experience onto this much larger context. But interestingly, I was finishing a draft of this book, literally on the last chapter, which, as you know, does take place during the Russia Ukraine conflict, when Putin announced his full scale invasion.

  AK: I read online that in addition to being a novelist you are also a travel journalist. I was curious about the way in which that background may have impacted the book at all. But I'm now wondering the opposite, did your grandparents experiences rub off on you to make you want to become a travel journalist?

  SV: I mean, who doesn't want to become a travel journalist? Doesn’t that sound glamorous? But people who grew up in Soviet Union generally are pretty obsessed with traveling. It's partly because people weren't allowed to. I was very young when Soviet Union fell apart, so I didn't feel that I couldn't, but a lot of people do. It's also an economic status thing. For a lot of people, even when USSR fell apart and you lived in Ukraine or Russia, whatever, people were all poor, basically, and traveling was just not really an option. Interestingly, when the war in Ukraine began two years ago, one of the hardest things for Russians and one of the punishments that they got was their inability to travel as much.

  AK: Tell me about the research process. It seems like there's probably two layers to this research, the historical research, but then also the personal family research. How did you learn about these things that happened to your grandfather?

  SV: I think of this story as, I don't know, 5% based on reality, 95% fictionalized, because I had so little to go on. The first thing I did when I started researching was I emailed this very famous American professor, a Historian, who researched World War II and Ukraine. I told him I want to write a book, but here’s what I don't understand: how does a Jewish person captured in Germany survive? And he said, “I have no idea.” Well, that was helpful. So that was the question that was hardest to answer.

  I luckily came across this research from at least two Soviet historians who are Jewish and who investigated exactly this, thank God. They interviewed other Jewish POWs and there were trends that I noticed that repeated from one person to another, one of which was they changed their name. Research like this helped explain the inexplicable parts of how my grandfather survived and how I'm here on this earth.

  I had very minimal facts to go on. Sometimes it'd be like, “I remember it was very cold,” something like that. In a short letter, if somebody notes the cold, that means it was so cold that it was worth mentioning. It stuck in his memory 40 years later, so those details felt important to build off.

  I hated research. Research was hard. But the harder part was the psychology of a young Soviet 19 or 18 year old soldier who was in that situation. What was he like before the war? What did all the things that happened during the war do to him? And then to also answer that same question of psychology for the next 60 years. In a way, I think basing fiction on a real person, a real story, makes the psychology harder. Because usually if you write fiction, you often start out with an arc, an emotional change. And here was the reverse process.

  AK: Before reading your book, I had never heard of Ostarbeiters, that was just fascinating for me to learn about. Could you explain who those people were?

  SV: Ostarbeiters translates from German as Eastern workers. While that sounds innocent, they were actually forced laborers who were caught on the streets of Ukraine, Belarus, other occupied regions, and deported on cattle trains to work in Germany, where they worked in different industries. Sometimes it was very related to the military directly, and sometimes it was farmland. All the able-bodied men were fighting, so there was a huge lack of labor in Germany. A lot of them were women. Some of them lived in labor camps and worked in factories or dug train tracks, like, really hard labor. Some of them worked in easier conditions, like in homes. As the war progressed, they got younger and younger. By 1944, most new workers were under 16 years old. Because a lot of them were young women, they were often raped. There were tens of thousands of pregnancies that occurred due to rape. Their conditions were often better than Soviet prisoners of war, who were sort of purposefully exterminated at the beginning of the war and then often used as forced laborers later.

  When these Ostarbeiters came back home they were one of the groups that was very much mistreated and shunned by society and almost never talked about what happened to them there. And it has not been written about at all. Even in the current Soviet Union, this is not a very well known phenomenon.

  AK: How did you first come across it?

  SV: I also never knew this term, but when I saw it in my grandfather's letter, that's the first time I heard of this thing. My grandma knew about it, obviously, because she was there during World War II. She almost became one. She was called up to show up at the Ostarbeiter recruiting office, but luckily had a record from her mother who had just died who had tuberculosis. She showed this record, and if you had a condition, if you were sick, they were not going to send you to Germany. They were very much purists, clearly. And so she was able to escape.

  AK: I’m wondering about the balance between conceiving of this work as an attempt at education, versus trying to work out your own family history.

  SV: I think I was probably leaning more towards educating other people. I'm trying to think back. I felt like it's a good story. I felt that immediately when I heard about the letter. I just didn't have the confidence that I should be the one to tell a story. But it had all the right elements, like the span of it, the drama of it, the survival aspect of it, the fact that you think of someone as a hero, but it turns out they're a victim. I thought, this is a book that somebody should write, I just don't think it's me.

  And then it took another ten years to write it, and it made me realize how little I knew of my own culture's history. It’s a weird thing to realize about yourself as an adult.

• BOMB - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/08/22/sasha-vasilyuk-by-alia-volz/

  Sasha Vasilyuk by Alia Volz
  Unraveling family secrets: a novelist’s journey through Soviet-era silence.
  August 22, 2024
  The cover of the book is red and includes a soviet officer hat above the title with the "face" comprised of a dosier.
  Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence Is Mandatory, 2024, Bloomsbury Publishing.

  Share
  Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024) opens with the death of its protagonist, Yefim Shulman. At eighty-four, he passes away from natural causes, leaving behind a legacy as a beloved grandfather, retired geologist, and honored Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran. While cleaning up after the funeral, his widow Nina discovers a confession letter addressed to the KGB in an old briefcase, unraveling Yefim’s hidden past.

  In this arresting debut novel, which is longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, journalist Sasha Vasilyuk draws upon her family’s experiences to bring us a story of shifting borders, shifting identities, secrets, and survival. The author weaves timelines deftly, gliding through seventy years of tumultuous Soviet and post-Soviet history. Vasilyuk’s perspective is intimate, and her prose is artful and restrained. Your Presence Is Mandatory is at once a meditation, a eulogy, and a compulsive page-turner.

  Vasilyuk and I are colleagues in a long-standing writing group. Though our books could not be more different, we’ve both followed our ancestors’ breadcrumb trails into the woods—and this has led to some fascinating conversations. My forthcoming memoir explores my great-grandmother’s audio journal chronicling her marriage to a sexy ghost. Vasilyuk mines her grandfather’s KGB confession and her grandmother’s memoir. I watched Your Presence Is Mandatory emerge, chapter by chapter, draft by draft. Still, when I immersed myself in the finished book, I felt like I was reading it for the first time, and I was taken with the richness and complexity of that journey. I had fresh questions, which I asked Sasha via email from my home in Portugal.

  Alia Volz
  Your novel opens and closes in a cemetery, though I don’t experience Your Presence Is Mandatory as a book about death. It seems, insistently, to revolve around life. What are you playing with here?

  Sasha Vasilyuk
  I think death is when a life can be looked back upon and summed up. It’s a time when that life’s story no longer belongs to the person who lived it but to those who are still alive and who choose to remember that person. This novel came about when my grandfather passed away and my family found a confession letter addressed to the KGB that revealed his true story. So, the end of his life became a new beginning for me as his story took hold of my imagination.

  I also really love circular narrative structures. Life often feels more circular than linear. We keep performing the same rituals, revisiting the same memories, or returning to the same places over and over. Take cemeteries for example. They’re these marginal spaces, right? They may be visited by loved ones on an annual pilgrimage, but they’re rarely given much thought the rest of the year. When war happens, cemeteries suddenly become a lot more central as death counts rise. The quiet undisturbed cemetery in the first chapter becomes something quite different by the end.

  AV
  Your battle scenes are as tense and visceral as any I’ve read. Your Presence Is Mandatory differentiates itself from many WWII novels by alternating high adventure with domestic drama. Because you’re also exploring a marriage troubled by secrecy, self-abnegation, and yearning for something sweeter. You take great care with characters who never set foot on a battlefield. What compelled you to include the perspectives of the protagonist’s wife, daughter, and granddaughter in this novel?

  SV
  From its conception, the book was going to include both Yefim’s war story and the decades of peace leading up to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I wanted to explore both how he survives, why he hides what he did to survive, and how that affects him and his family thereafter. Often in WWII historical fiction, contemporary timelines are just a device, but I wanted to give equal weight to the war and to life in postwar Soviet and post-Soviet spaces in the decades after because WWII remains pivotal.

  At first, the narrative was going to be predominantly Yefim’s story, but since I wanted to explore how his secrecy reverberates through generations, I began including other characters’ perspectives. I tried writing some chapters. For example, one where Yefim first meets his future wife Nina—first from his point of view, then from hers. When you’re working with someone hiding something, it’s an interesting and challenging experiment to portray it from the point of view of the one who’s doing the hiding, and then from the one from whom something is being hidden. You also must consider how much the reader already knows or suspects.

  1600 Portait of a light-skinned brunette woman smiling at the camera.
  Photo of Sasha Vasilyuk by Christopher Michel.

  AV
  On a craft level, it was fascinating to watch that process unfold in our writing group. I didn’t always understand what you were chasing, but it works beautifully. Your Presence Is Mandatory is also a rather begrudging love story. No one gets swept off their feet, which I found refreshing. The romance creeps up on you.

  SV
  I love that you see that! Yes, at its heart, Your Presence Is Mandatory is a story of a marriage and thus of love, albeit a complicated love that plays out across more than half a century and is bookended by wars.

  AV
  We’ve both based our projects on missives left by dead relatives. While my great-grandmother left me an overwhelming amount of material, your grandfather destroyed all but a single two-page letter. You extract such a rich and textured life from that sole artifact. Do you think the terseness of the confession increased its power? And how does that letter link us to the current conflict in Ukraine?

  SV
  Yes, every word in his letter became a seed from which entire chapters grew. The letter is mostly dates, places, and names—I was here, then I was there. So, when among those dry facts you encounter a detail like hiding in a pig pen or being betrayed by a fellow forced laborer, the gravity of those details is palpable.

  His letter is a testament to a whole generation that kept silent about their experiences, not only because of trauma—as is the case with war vets anywhere—but also because their stories contrasted with official State history. One tragic effect of this generational silence is that it makes it easier for Putin’s regime to revise history and use it as a weapon of propaganda in the current war in Ukraine.

  AV
  The Russia-Ukraine conflict has been ongoing for many years, but it ramped up like hell during the writing of this book. How did that shape your approach? Were there plotlines or angles that you either abandoned or pursued more aggressively on account of Putin’s actions in Ukraine?

  SV
  I was finishing the last pre-agent draft when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The book sold soon after. As I worked on it with my Bloomsbury editor, a new world reality kept pulling at me. For example, while Your Presence Is Mandatory ends in 2015, during the earlier regional Donbas War that ravages the family’s hometown, I kept wondering if I should extend the story to 2022. The answer was, of course, no, because the job of fiction isn’t to catch up to the news. But other reflections on the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine made it into the edits. I also had to carefully consider how I would spell the names of characters and places in Ukraine, because of the colonialist history of “Russification.”

  AV
  That feeds my next question. Borders shift throughout this book. For example, between one chapter and the next, the setting changes from Stalino to Donetsk without the characters going anywhere. We also see political leaders sowing discord between neighbors where it might not naturally exist. What do you hope readers will take away from this?

  SV
  Eastern Europe is one long story of changing borders, and nationalities that are brought in or removed. Countries, cities, streets, et cetera, are constantly being renamed based on who’s in charge. This remains a hot-button issue today, as Ukraine is trying to cleanse itself of Russian influence by reclaiming historical Ukrainian names. The renaming has been part of the American conversation in the past few years, too, but to get the scale of its impact in Eastern Europe, just imagine New York being renamed to New Amsterdam. I wanted readers to experience the disorientation of living in a place where reality never feels stable or permanent.

  “I think of this book not just as a reclamation of my grandfather’s lost narrative, but also as a way to give voice to millions of people who were squeezed on both sides by two totalitarian regimes and told they had no moral right to ever talk about it.”
  — Sasha Vasilyuk
  AV
  There is a moment toward the end of the book, seen from elderly Yefim’s perspective, in which he notices that his son, now an adult, hides things from his own children. Secrecy has become cyclical, and this saddens Yefim. Can you talk about secrecy as a multigenerational force? In your own childhood, was the weight of your grandfather’s secrets something you felt?

  SV
  I grew up in a family and a society where secrecy—or silence—was ever-present. By default, a totalitarian regime breeds secrecy as a survival mechanism, a way to protect yourself and those you love from the dangers posed by the State. When I was a kid, it wasn’t something that I paid any attention to. Only now do I better understand the cost of such deep-rooted silence. If you grow up whispering things at home that you’d never say outside, you become perfectly capable of living your private life without speaking out when your country slips back into totalitarianism decades later. Which is exactly what’s happening in Russia today.

  AV
  You are a no-nonsense journalist with a skeptical mind. I know you don’t believe in ghosts. Still, I must ask: Did you ever feel guided or watched by your grandparents? Did you worry about how they might feel about your depiction?

  SV
  I haven’t felt guided by my grandparents in the way you mean, but I do somehow think that if they weren’t happy with what I was doing, I’d know it. One of my more palpable guides has been my father. He passed away two weeks after I began writing this novel—which is a whole other story—and I keep his photo on my bedside table. Every time I’m unsure about what I’m saying, both in the novel and in the personal essays I’ve published since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I look at his photo and mentally check in with him. He was a psychologist, a writer—weirdly, his posthumously published book just won a major prize in Russia—and a morally rigorous person, so he acts as my barometer of quality. If I feel like he wouldn’t approve of what I’ve written, I rework it. But if he does, I know I’m all good.

  AV
  Did you hope to understand something about yourself by imagining your grandparents’ lives in minute detail?

  SV
  Writing about my grandparents isn’t as much a way to understand myself as it is a way to understand how humans lived through the insanity of the twentieth century. I think the generational gap between us and those who came of age along with my grandparents is enormous, perhaps the biggest that’s ever been. The laws, the technology, the medicine. Their lives seem so inherently more dramatic than ours that I feel like I can’t write about today until I better understand how we got here. Perhaps there is also a feeling of debt. After all, I exist because my grandfather survived as a Jew in Germany and my grandmother as an orphan in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

  AV
  Does writing about a deceased loved one have an element of resurrection? Your real grandfather died in 2007, but Yefim seems very much alive on the page. Was there something you hoped to give this version of Yefim by breathing life back into him here? Perhaps a second chance to be heard?

  SV
  Definitely. I think of this book not just as a reclamation of my grandfather’s lost narrative, but also as a way to give voice to millions of people who were squeezed on both sides by two totalitarian regimes and told they had no moral right to ever talk about it. Now their descendants are enmeshed in a new war in part because they’re unaware of their true history. In my small way, I’m trying to correct that.

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  Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Golden Poppy Nonfiction Book Award. Her words have been chosen for The Best American Essays and The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her second book, Spirited: A Memoir of Family, Feminism, and Supernatural Romance, is forthcoming with Avid Reader Press.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/sasha-vasilyuk-on-the-price-of-secrecy-in-russia-and-ukraine/

  Sasha Vasilyuk on the Price of Secrecy in Russia and Ukraine
  Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of “Your Presence Is Mandatory”
  By Jane Ciabattari
  April 23, 2024
  Sasha Vasilyuk’s propulsive first novel, which explores the repercussions of a wartime secret on the family of a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran, was written with a potent combination of empathy and urgency. It is being published at a crisis point in the history of her homeland. “I was editing the last chapter, which takes place during the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2014, when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” she told me when I asked her about the effect of recent years of tumult on her life and work:

  For someone who grew up in both countries and still had close family there, most of whom were suddenly in very serious danger, this was one of the most traumatic events of my life. And yet, it was also then that I was approached by my agent and very soon had a multi-country book deal on my hands. Ever since, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that some wires got crossed between fiction and reality.

  Our email conversation took place a few weeks after she’d published a CNN opinion piece on the anniversary of the war titled “I grew up in Ukraine and Russia. Here’s what I say when people ask where I’m from.”

  *

  Jane Ciabattari: This novel spans decades, from June 1941, at the onset of World War II through August 2015, after current war in Ukraine began in spring of 2014. How was your inspiration for this novel related to your own family history?

  Sasha Vasilyuk: The novel is inspired by the story of my grandfather, a Ukrainian Jewish WWII vet who left a letter addressed to the KGB when he died, which revealed his hidden wartime past and completely shocked me and my family. In Your Presence is Mandatory, I wanted to dig deeper into his story of survival in Nazi Germany and USSR because it revealed parts of history that have been kept out of textbooks. I also wanted to investigate what is the price of secrecy on the secret-keeper, on their loved ones and on a whole society.

  That trip made me realize how deeply connected these two wars are for the people who live there.
  The book is also inspired by my trip to the Donbas to visit my family after the Russia-Ukraine conflict began there. My grandmother, who survived the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, never thought she’d live to see another war, especially started by Russia. The city was full of slogans and images that called back to the Soviet times. That trip made me realize how deeply connected these two wars are for the people who live there, so it made sense to create this epic, multigenerational, seventy-year arc.

  JC: What sort of research was involved in writing about such a span of time? Family papers? Interviews? Other documents?

  SV: Grandpa’s letter was very short and, given that it was addressed to the KGB and was written forty years after WWII, it wasn’t exactly reliable. It also contained almost no emotional truths and left a lot of unanswered questions. One of the main questions for me was, How does a Jewish soldier survive four years in Nazi Germany? I couldn’t answer it—and thus couldn’t write this book—until I came across the research of historians Pavel Polian and Aron Shneyer who’d interviewed Soviet Jewish POWs about exactly that question.

  Luckily, for the other half of the book—what I call the “peace” part—I had help from my grandma’s memoir. The woman had an incredible memory and a knack for description, which was very helpful in getting the details of life in Ukraine in the postwar decades. Researching Soviet life is rife with state secrecy and, these days, with multiple Putin-sanctioned bans. So in many ways, that personal, lived experience is so much more valuable than typical historical research.

  JC: How were you able to write the battle scenes in which Yefim Shulman is engaged as an artilleryman for the Red Army in Lithuania with such gritty realism?

  SV: That was one of the parts I was most nervous about since I’ve never been in a war, obviously. My only experience was hearing shelling during my trip to the Donbas. I immersed myself in reading accounts by Soviet soldiers and journalists covering it. I also have a couple of friends who were Marines in Afghanistan. In describing war, I tried to steer away from the lyrical. War can sometimes lend itself toward lyrical and almost abstract (there is a gorgeous scene of an explosion in The Sympathizer, for example), but mostly I think war needs to stay in the realm of realism. It’s very bodily.

  JC: What was your best source of detail for the four years after Yefim was captured in August 1941, as a POW, then escaped to work as an “ostarbeiter,” or forced laborer?

  SV: It’s incredible how little research there is on both Soviet POWs and ostarbeiters. Mainly this is because both of these groups, which numbered in the millions, were repressed by the Soviet government and shunned by society. POWs, for example, weren’t treated as veterans—or received veterans’ benefits—until 1995, when most of them were in their seventies. Just think about that!

  Consequently, most of them were too ashamed to talk about their experience, even privately to their loved ones. So research wasn’t easy. Besides the above book on Jewish POWs, I found another very thick Russian-language book about POWs and a recent podcast mini-series where ostarbeiters were interviewed. As a journalist, it was important for me to hear first person accounts.

  At one point, as I worked on the first pass, I came across a paragraph that mentioned the German camp where my grandfather had been as a Soviet POW. I hadn’t been able to find anything on that camp—today, it’s basically a field with a headstone nearby that marks a mass grave. I realized that the paragraph was pulled from someone’s memoir and once I tracked it down, I discovered that the original typed pages were stored at Stanford’s Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an hour drive from my house.

  I made an appointment and rushed there during one of those insane “atmospheric river” downpours. The car was basically swimming and it was very dangerous to drive, but I was determined. Once I held the pages in my hands, it turned out that the author had spent only two days at that camp and wrote only a couple of paragraphs on it. But I did learn that prisoners slept standing under the rain, which was yet another detail that was so beyond anything I could have imagined as a fiction writer that it made the crazy trip worthwhile.

  JC: As a “repatriate” who rejoined the Red Army in the march to Berlin in April 1945, Yefim was questioned by SMERSH, the Soviet intelligence office, suspected of being a collaborator or a spy. “He was a prisoner of war, a forced laborer, and a Jew who had survived four years in the Reich, which was either very lucky or very suspicious.” How common was this experience?

  I wanted to explore the multigenerational repercussions of one person’s secrecy.
  SV: Every Soviet citizen found on enemy territory—about four million people—had gone through filtration where they were questioned by SMERSH. Many stayed in filtration camps, from which they could be sent back into the army or, especially once the war ended, to labor battalions back in the USSR, the Gulag where they rotted until after Stalin’s death eight years later, or home to their families. SMERSH was really a huge fork in the road for them.

  JC: The title of your novel comes from a KGB summons your protagonist Yefim receives in September 1984, requiring him to report to the Donetsk, Ukrainian SSR administrative office. What strikes you about this title?

  SV: The title projects a sense of threat and inescapability that underpins the emotional core of the novel as well as just of life in a totalitarian regime. Borrowing a phrase from a summons is also a nod to government forms that determined so much of who a person was, how they were treated, where they could go, and what they were allowed to do in life.

  JC: Although Yefim is at the center of your narrative, your structure gives us this complex family story through multiple narrators, including Yefim’s wife Nina, his daughter Vita, and his granddaughter Masha. How did you decide on that approach?

  SV: Secrecy and silence play a huge role in the Soviet society. I wanted to explore the multigenerational repercussions of one person’s secrecy, so showing what his wife, kids and grandkids are and aren’t seeing in him felt hugely important. The other characters also keep secrets of their own and though those secrets are smaller than Yefim’s, I was playing with the idea of the many reasons we hide certain parts of ourselves—often very defining parts—from those around us and sometimes even from ourselves.

  JC: You were born in Crimea, raised in Russia and Ukraine, came to the U.S. at thirteen, studied journalism, became an award-winning journalist. Recently you have published several CNN essays about the war in Ukraine and the death of Navalny. How have you navigated these years of conflict between Ukraine and Russia, your own family separations, living your own life in the San Francisco Bay Area, and witnessing these changes?

  SV: I have never been as politically aware or involved as in the past two years. I follow the war in Ukraine and the repressions in Russia. I’ve gotten to know many Soviet-born writers who live in the U.S. and foreign correspondents who are covering this crisis. And when I am alone, I am continuously tortured by the same questions that currently torture millions of people from that part of the world: How could this have happened? And what can be done?

  JC: What are you working on now/next?

  SV: I’m working on a more contemporary novel about turning a blind eye toward looming disaster, both in a private life and on a national level. It was going to feature Navalny, but now that he has been killed, I need to wrap my head around it in a new way. Anyway, it’s too early to tell whether I’ll be able to pull it off, but wish me luck.

  __________________________________

  Your Presence Is Mandatory by Sasha Vasilyuk is available from Bloomsbury Publishing.

Yurcaba, Nicole

Sasha Vasilyuk

Your Presence Is Mandatory

New York. Bloomsbury. 2024.313 pages.

IN YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY, Sasha Vasilyuk delivers the riveting story of a Soviet veteran whose long-held personal secret could not only land him in the gulag but also have dire, long-standing consequences for his wife and children. Your Presence Is Mandatory carries the story of Yefim Shulman, a father, husband, grandfather, Ukrainian Jew, and war veteran whose posthumous letter to the KGB unleashes a series of questions about whether or not Yefim's beloved family and co-workers truly knew him. However, Your Presence Is Mandatory is not a personal indictment of Yefim and his personal choice about what and what not to reveal to his family and friends. Instead, it is a criticism of the Soviet system, founded on maintaining a guise of pride at all costs and a systemic paranoia that influenced generations to come. Carefully woven, too, with Yefims story is a story of modern Ukraine grappling with Russia, its age-old oppressor, and the harbingers of war fueled by Russian propaganda and centuries of colonialism.

When the novel begins, readers see Yefim as a young man, deeply committed to his siblings and his parents. Readers perceive that young Yefim is a dedicated Soviet soldier, unwilling--or at least hesitant to--question the Soviet Union's methods and causes. At one point, Yefim reflects, "To have such conviction, against the USSR, of all things, seemed inexplicable." Emerging amid young Yefim's reluctance to acknowledge or admit the Soviet Union's fallacies is a developing awareness that something even more sinister might have been established by Stalin and his authorities--the famine, also known in Ukrainian as Holodomor. Yefim recalls how "during the famine, he overheard his neighbors saying that Moscow was deliberately starving Ukrainian peasants to death--that they never should have become Soviet. They'd said it with the same kind of hate and it had shocked Yefim to tears." Similar conversations repeat throughout the novel, particularly in the scenes in which Yefim is a prisoner of war in Germany. Yefim encounters other Ukrainians who recognize that the famine "wasn't some natural tragedy." At these points, Your Presence Is Mandatory possesses historical anecdotes to offer contemporary readers, and particularly Western and American ones, who may be encountering the Holodomor's relevance and legacy for the first time.

Another notable character in Vasilyuk's book is Nikonov, Yefim's friend, who openly criticizes the Soviet regime, so much so that he has frequently endured numerous interrogations. At times, Nikonov's blunt criticisms balance Yefim's naiveté about what the Soviet regime truly thinks of its people. Nikonov frequently espouses that a Red Army soldier serves only two purposes: "shoot bullets into enemy chests or absorb enemy bullets so they run out of them quicker." He acknowledges that the Soviet Union would cast World War II as "our country's greatest act of bravery and sacrifice, and people who don't fit into that storyline will be inconvenient. People like you and me. And I don't need to tell you what our Motherland does with inconveniences." Thus, Nikonov s sentiments echo with a global public bearing witness to Russia's brutal 2022 invasion of Ukraine as well as the inhumane treatment of those inside Russia who disagree with Vladimir Putin's "special military operation."

Therefore, one cannot read Your Presence Is Mandatory without noticing its conversation about war's consequences, not only on soldiers and veterans, but also later generations. First, the novel examines the culture of silence and denial perpetuated by the Soviet system, which forced Yefim to lie about the actual events that led him to Germany during the war. Yefim shapes a story vastly different than reality in order to spare himself, and ultimately his family, the gulag. Threaded through the novel, too, is the Soviet Union's glorification of its military might and supposed military accomplishments. Eerily, readers familiar with Russia's invasion of Ukraine will see a familiar narrative, since Russia continually touts its accomplishments during the Great Patriotic War (World War II) even today. Thus, Yefim and Nikonov's recognition of their expendability in the context of the Soviet machine makes them two of the novel's most human, and most self-aware, characters. Yefim's family is permanently shaped by his involvement in the war, too, because Yefim refuses to share his war stories with them. His silence grants them a certain plausible deniability. After his death, and after his secrets revelation, each family member must grapple with the consequences of Yefim's silence.

Your Presence Is Mandatory, despite its predominantly historical setting, is immediate and necessary, especially as former Soviet countries like Ukraine grapple not only to defend their sovereignty but to also slowly uncover their history without a Soviet gaze. Personal and haunting, Yefim's story will remain with readers indefinitely, because all are called to present as Yefim and his family recount their stories.

Nicole Yurcaba
Southern New Hampshire University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 University of Oklahoma
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Yurcaba, Nicole. "Sasha Vasilyuk: Your Presence Is Mandatory." World Literature Today, vol. 98, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783796228/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9531277c. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Your Presence Is Mandatory. By Sasha Vasilyuk. Apr. 2024. 336p. Bloomsbury, $28.99 (9781639731534).

Nina buries her husband Yefim in Ukraine in 2007. Their relationship was complicated by secrets harbored since WWII, and when a KGB letter from 1984 surfaces, Nina realizes that a false foundation underpinned what she thought she knew about her husband of 50 years. The story rewinds to Yefims wartime experiences fighting the Nazis as a Jewish artillerist, slowly unspooling a lose-lose situation with generational effects. Ukrainian-born Vasilyuk draws on her family background to illuminate the personal, cultural, and experiential. Nina muses that her parents grew up under the Romanovs and she and Yefim under Stalin; "how could their idea of romance--or even of life itself--be anything alike?" There is wry humor. The couple's son studies psychology, and they beg him for a more practical profession than "listening to people's problems in a country where most people's problem was the country itself." Full of devastating pathos and elucidation of how war and, especially, fascist and communist mindsets destroy one's humanity, this timely novel is a robust addition to the growing body of literature chronicling the Ukrainian experience.--Bethany Latham

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Latham, Bethany. "Your Presence Is Mandatory." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2024, p. 31. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783436392/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69ca53a8. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Vasilyuk, Sasha YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY Bloomsbury (Fiction None) $28.99 4, 23 ISBN: 9781639731534

A Ukrainian soldier survives World War II to face a lifetime of secrets.

When Yefim Shulman goes off to war, he imagines himself fighting for glory, honor, and other ideals. It's 1941, and Yefim is a young Ukrainian artilleryman from a Jewish family stationed on the border between Germany and the Soviet Union. The realities of not only war, but of Stalinist politics--including Stalin's hand in the famine Yefim's family barely survived--soon come barreling toward Yefim not unlike cannon fire. Chapters set during the war alternate with chapters set much later; to begin with, Yefim, as an old man, has just died, and among his papers, his wife has found a letter to the KGB that seems to indicate that much of what he has told his family about his wartime experiences was untrue. Vasilyuk, a journalist as well as a debut novelist, sets out to comb through all this with patience, subtlety, and finesse, and she is occasionally successful. Various challenges get in her way, however. For one thing, she has an unfortunate penchant for describing warfare with cliches ("the bombs dropped with blood-chilling shrieks") and a worse habit of describing Soviet or German characters by way of American idioms they never would have used themselves ("He must have been one lucky son of a gun"). Still, these are small complaints, easy to forgive. Less so are the way the action sags as the novel plods along and the way the characters never quite spring to life, no matter how many puppet-style strings Vasilyuk pulls.

Despite its subject matter, the novel lacks urgency and is overly reliant on other novels set in the Soviet period.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Vasilyuk, Sasha: YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3e2effb9. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Yurcaba, Nicole. "Sasha Vasilyuk: Your Presence Is Mandatory." World Literature Today, vol. 98, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2024, p. 79. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783796228/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9531277c. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024. Latham, Bethany. "Your Presence Is Mandatory." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 12, 15 Feb. 2024, p. 31. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783436392/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69ca53a8. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024. "Vasilyuk, Sasha: YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A788096706/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3e2effb9. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

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