On War and Family Secrets
Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024), defies categorization—at once historical fiction, family saga, and World War II thriller, drawing from Vasilyuk’s own family history. Your Presence Is Mandatory spans from World War II through the modern Russia-Ukraine conflict and follows a Ukrainian Jewish World War II veteran, Yefim, whose lifelong secret ripples across time, leaving questions and mysteries in its wake. Vasilyuk, who began writing Your Presence Is Mandatory in 2017 after a trip to war-torn Donetsk, spoke with fellow novelist Danny Goodman about the depths charted to bring this incredible story to readers.
DG: I was fascinated by the untold stories in this novel, the way they shape (and reshape) both the narrative and characters impacted by their revelations. What drew you to unearthing these stories?
SV: In the Soviet Union where I was born, untold stories shadowed everything that was loudly proclaimed. But as a kid, I grew up in the era of glasnost when it seemed like after decades of keeping silent, everyone was eagerly talking about previously unmentionable things. What I didn’t realize for a long time was that, despite this façade of an open public discourse, there remained a thick deposit of completely silenced stories that existed only in the KGB archives and in the tightly guarded memories of witnesses. My own grandfather had been such a witness and had spent decades carefully hiding what happened to him during WWII, until we discovered the truth of his experience as a Jewish soldier in Nazi Germany after his death. His story felt unique, though it was the tip of an iceberg: a huge layer of my country’s history had been hidden. The resulting novel is a family saga that revolves around the marriage of Nina, a Ukrainian paleontologist, and Yefim, a Jewish war vet. In a nutshell, it explores why we hide things from the people we love.
DG: Jewishness plays a large part throughout Your Presence Is Mandatory, most notably Yefim’s Jewish identity.
SV: In the beginning of the book, Yefim is a Jewish soldier fighting for Stalin against Hitler. When he is captured by the Germans, his Jewishness becomes his central problem and his biggest secret. He must survive in a horrible POW camp while hiding his ethnic identity not just from the Germans, but also from his fellow Soviet captives, who were often willing to give up a Jew. The novel is braided—we see chapters of Yefim’s adventures in Nazi Germany interspersed with the family saga happening in the decades between WWII and the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In those “peace” chapters, the characters’ relationship with Judaism changes from being suppressed during Soviet times to being rediscovered after the USSR collapsed. Neither of these two experiences of Soviet Jews are well understood in the US. And it’s not just Soviet Jews. When I lived in Poland in 2016, I wrote about the Jewish community there, and everyone kept telling me how they discovered they were Jewish only in the 1990s, after Communism fell in Eastern Europe.
DG: When I had the pleasure of seeing you read in New York City, you talked about the experience of being in Donetsk in 2016, and how a shell explosion changed you. In the Los Angeles Times, you said that trip gave you “an understanding of what war feels like and sounds like and smells like and looks like.”
SV: I’ve always perceived war as something that happens to other people, in other times, in history books or on movie screens. There was a sense of removal. Even when war began in my family’s city of Donetsk in 2014, I was in California watching it on Skype, and it continued to feel removed and thus, as you rightly say, incomprehensible. I couldn’t imagine it happening to me or understand what it might feel like if it had. My trip to war-torn Donetsk to visit my family changed that. Though I wasn’t on the battlefield, I experienced the main emotion of any war: terror. Paradoxically, the terror I experienced is why I found the courage to write a novel about a soldier in the first place.
Since we meet Yefim on the eve of Hitler’s attack on the USSR, I wanted to preserve that sense of disbelief and incomprehensibility that he and others around him experienced as WWII begins. War is a huge force that’s both completely outside of your control and that has the most direct effect on your life, literally. That is what makes it unique and fascinating. Throughout Your Presence Is Mandatory, I wanted to immerse the reader in that sense of trying to exert control on a situation that’s completely beyond it.
DG: The idea of isolation, of being alone both emotionally and physically, permeates the novel—[Yefim] continued to run, alone; Once again, they were on their own; …and he’d grown up alone; stories of Yefim surviving alone in Siberia—while the novel is simultaneously about family and shared history and the bonds forged therein.
SV: That’s a great observation, Danny. I think secrecy, especially when it’s a secrecy enforced by society and permeated by fear or shame, makes one feel very alone, so I wanted to make that a central part of Yefim’s story. And yet, interestingly, one of the main characteristics of the Soviet experience was how communal it was, how similar life was for most people, no matter where or how they lived.
In that, it’s quite different from an American life, where you might have similar cultural references like music, TV, etc., but there’s quite a difference between growing up in, say, New York City and in the suburbs of Idaho. In my novel, I wanted to portray loneliness inside this communal experience. And now that I hear readers share similar family stories, I realize that the secrecy and the loneliness were an immense part of many families’ lives.
DG: As someone constantly terrified of this new wave of Nazism growing in the US, I was particularly shaken by Yefim’s struggle, by the horrors he encounters and the secrets he’s forced to keep in order to survive. This moment early in the novel really struck me:
“Yefim’s shaking turned more and more violent until he was filled with fury: at Hitler for wanting a land that wasn’t his to want, at himself for not being as brave as he’d thought.”
This idea of being brave enough haunted me long after I’d left the novel. What was your relationship to Yefim’s (or, your grandfather’s) bravery as you were writing?
SV: I think talking about Nazism and the Holocaust inevitably opens up that question of bravery. I know you also wrestle with the question of bravery in Amerikaland. I believe we crave stories of someone brave enough to stand up to the mass machinery of evil (I’m thinking of the revenge porn of Inglorious Bastards, for example). It is extremely hard for us modern people, especially in America where individual agency is glorified and canonized, to face the truth: fear and obedience are extremely powerful human
forces. Bravery is the exception, not the rule. So, I didn’t want to make Yefim into some sort of Jewish superhero. But I did want to give him small acts of bravery—really, of self-preservation, of disobedience—because that was what it often took to survive.
DG: Our debut novels both touch on some similar themes—most notably the dangers of totalitarian regimes—and, in their own ways, each novel explores the fear and anxiety of seeing the horrors of the past reemerge in the present. Why was this important for you to write about?
SV: When I began writing my novel, the world was ignoring a war happening in eastern Ukraine. It was too small and regional, and no one gave a shit. By the time I finished it, the whole world was watching the long-ignored regional conflict turn into the biggest European land war since WWII. I think you’re working under the same premise: that smaller century mythology—made me want to finally tackle this complex story.
DG: You immigrated to the US as a teenager—how did that experience shape this novel?
SV: Because I straddle two cultures, it felt essential for me to debut with a book that brings a story from my homeland to the American reader. When I wrote Yefim’s experience of working for the Germans, I relied on what it felt like to be a foreigner, of aligning with others who speak your language against those whose society you’re thrust into. Obviously, a Jewish captive in Nazi Germany isn’t the same as a Russian-speaking immigrant in 1990s US, but some of my psychological experiences were helpful in drawing his character.
I miss my family and the summers I spent visiting them in Ukraine and Russia, which have been made impossible by Putin’s regime and his war. So, I’ve put all those feelings into the novel. The apartment in Ukraine, where several of the peace chapters take place, is what I think of when I hear the word “home.” It has been sitting empty since 2014, when my family was forced to flee the region. In the book, I was able to breathe back life into it using my memories and photographs I took as a teenager when I’d fly from the US to see them.
Danny Goodman is the author of Amerikaland, a novel (2024).
