Your Presence Is Mandatory
A Novel
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature | Gold Medal Winner for the 94th Annual California Book Awards | Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
A riveting debut novel, based on real events, about a World War II veteran with a secret that could land him in the Gulag, and his family who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them.
Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.
In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family.
Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren. In the process, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Get a glimpse at life behind the Iron Curtain in this remarkable historical fiction debut. As a young man, Yefim Shulman, a Ukrainian Jew inspired by Stalin’s vision of an egalitarian proletariat, joined the Russian army to fight against the Nazis. After the fall of Berlin, Yefim returns home. There he starts a family, attempting to navigate his way through the ever-changing Soviet culture. Yet Yefim has a secret—one that, if discovered, would have him seen as worse than a traitor or deserter: He had been captured by the Nazis and held as a prisoner of war. First-time author Sasha Vasilyuk takes us on a captivating journey from Yefim’s time in Germany’s forced labour camps to his life after the fall of communism and Ukrainian independence. We were fascinated by Yefim’s story and how his worry about the KGB discovering his secret coloured every aspect of his life. Meticulously researched and incredibly gripping, Your Presence Is Mandatory is historical fiction at its finest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vasilyuk's impressive debut chronicles the tribulations of a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran and his widow's distress in the early stages of the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War. Yefim Shulman, 18, is stationed in Lithuania with the Red Army in 1941 when he's injured during a surprise nighttime attack. Later, he and his fellow survivors are ambushed and forced to work in a series of labor camps. After spending four years in captivity, he rejoins the Red Army in Niegripp and takes part in the invasion of Berlin. Back in Ukraine after the war, he marries bookish Nina. Looming over their life together is Stalin's Order No. 270, which labels as a traitor anyone who fell captive to the Germans. Forced to lie for his survival, Yefim tells people he was never imprisoned. Throughout, Vasilyuk alternates the narration between Yefim, who dies in 2007, and Nina, who lives in Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2015. In a poignant moment, she reflects how, after surviving famine and WWII, she never thought she'd see the town she lived in for most of her life destroyed from within by separatists. This is a reverberating exploration of guilt, trauma, and the turbulent history between Ukraine and Russia.
