Sasha Vasilyuk was born in the Soviet Crimea, and she spent her childhood in Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at the age of 13. Vasilyuk had always known her Jewish and Ukrainian grandfather as a World War II hero. When he passed away, her grandmother discovered a confession he’d written to the KGB that revealed a secret he’d kept his entire life. This letter—and the fraught, hidden history it implied—became the inspiration for Vasilyuk’s debut novel, Your Presence is Mandatory.
In the novel, Yefim Shulman, a Jewish Ukrainian, becomes a soldier after Germany attacks the Soviet Union in 1941. Throughout prison camps and years of forced labor, Yefim conceals his Jewish roots in order to survive. After the war, he meets Nina, a Ukrainian orphan studying to be a professor. They move to the Donbas and have children, and while their life is good by Soviet standards, Yefim is afraid to reveal what really happened to him during the war, because the truth might put them all in danger.
The narrative of Presence jumps back and forth in time, from 1941 to 2015, with plenty of stops in between. This structure allows Vasilyuk to reveal crucial moments in Yefim’s life and offer new perspectives from his family members. With page-turning action and complex, honestly dishonest characters, we see how silence and lies can reverberate through the decades.
I first met Vasilyuk at an AWP party, where I was delighted to discover that we share a literary agent, an editor, and a pub month for our debut books. We spoke on the phone about her novel, the power of family secrets, and how she was inspired by both personal and historical events to tell this story.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Jessie Ren Marshall
One of the things I love about this book is that we see both the personal story of the Shulman family and the larger history of the region during the war and its aftermath. How did you balance those two elements?
Sasha Vasilyuk
I think of this book as an anti-totalitarian novel disguised as a family saga. It’s based on things that happened with my actual family, but it is also representative of millions of stories that have been hidden away and silenced, stories that died with the people that carry them. And so it has these two dimensions to it—unique and personal, but also representative of a whole culture.
Because there are very few people who survived the war, my grandfather’s ability to make it to Berlin in 1945 signaled that he was a brave soldier. And even though he never talked about any of that, and never proliferated that myth, that was the accepted reality for me and my family. His confession letter to the KGB revealed something very, very different about the way he was able to survive. The second I heard about this letter, it felt like such an incredible story that someone should write it as a novel. I did not think it should be me! But then, in 2014, a war started in the Donbas in Ukraine where my family lived. And in 2016, I went there. I got to see my family and grandmother. And I saw and heard what war looks like. Before that, writing about World War II and war in general—writing about a soldier in the war, who does unthinkable things during war—seemed so unfeasible to me. But after that trip to the Donbas, I suddenly felt like I could. There’s something about hearing shelling, and ducking. That switched my perspective, so I began working on the novel in 2017.
There were two parts of the story that really interested me. First, how was he able to survive, given that he was Jewish and was thrust into Nazi Germany, and the second part was the silence he kept. The more I learned about it, the more I realized how prevalent it is. Essentially every person from the former USSR has a grandparent who survived World War II and never talked about it, or who survived the famine in Ukraine in the 30s and never talked about it. Or some have occasionally talked about it on their deathbed. To relieve themselves.
Jessie Ren Marshall
How do you write about silence as a novelist, when the only tool you have to tell this story is language—silence’s opposite? And to what extent are you telling this story now to give voice to that previously silenced experience?
Sasha Vasilyuk
It was a challenge. How do you present a character whose main objective is to keep a secret from other characters in the book? One way of doing it is you’re in his head. I started the book that way, from Yefim’s point of view. But I wondered how silence might manifest itself on the receiving end. So I decided to tell the story not just through Yefim, but from the point of view of his wife, Nina, and his two children who grow up as the novel progresses, and also the third generation, which is my generation, the granddaughter. And because there are multiple other ways those people also keep secrets, it became this larger theme.
Jessie Ren Marshall
For much of the novel, Yefim believes he’s keeping his secret to protect his family. But there’s a wonderful line near the book’s end that throws this logic into question: “He didn’t want to admit that what started out as a way to protect his family from harm had become a way to protect himself from his family.” I read that as a realization that his silence keeps him safe from reliving the trauma of the war. If silence isn’t the answer, what’s a more appropriate way to share traumatic events with your family?
Sasha Vasilyuk
So, I am a little bit obsessed with this idea of a noble lie. I feel like it’s based on this unconquerable fear. It’s a selfish fear of losing loved one’s respect, of losing faith. A lot of people don’t talk about personal trauma, because even though it’s not their fault, there is a lot of shame associated with it. I don’t know what the moral answer is! I think every person comes to that answer themselves.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, I didn’t realize it, but I was essentially doing the same thing as my grandfather. I did not tell my son there was a war, even though we had plans to go to Russia and Ukraine. I just couldn’t bear telling him, and part of the reason was because I was so ashamed. But the way I couched it for myself was: he’s too young. He lives across the world. Why does he need to know his cousins are refugees, or that his uncle is in a bomb shelter right now? He’s four. He doesn’t really need the brutal reality of life. But really, I was ashamed to tell him that this country called Russia—which I’ve talked to him about, with a language I’ve been pushing him to speak—is now akin to a Nazi Germany. So it’s ironic. I’m working on a novel about silence and shame, and then I’m recreating it in a small way.
Jessie Ren Marshall
After she finds the letter, Nina wonders if her marriage to Yefim could have been better, or if their family would have been better, if they had known this secret.
Sasha Vasilyuk
The reaction of my actual family to finding the letter was exactly that. We so wished he’d told us! It wouldn’t have changed how we felt about him. We would have understood and consoled him and asked him all these questions. It feels like an immeasurable loss to not know this incredible journey that this person went on, literally and emotionally. I had to recreate it in a fictional way to try to get into his head.
Jessie Ren Marshall
You’re using fiction to deal with issues that are important to you and important to the world, and in this novel, you give readers an intimate experience of history. I’m curious who you feel you’re writing for. For your children, or their generation? To put it another way, who do you hope will pick up this novel and be changed by it?
Sasha Vasilyuk
My Italian editor gave me the best compliment. She told me that she thought she was getting a book about Ukraine. But in fact, it’s really about Europe’s history. Whether a reader is from that region and can relate, or whether they knew nothing about World War II beforehand, I hope this novel tugs at people emotionally. I think the emotional tug is what I’m hoping for the most, because it will give readers a perspective on things that are happening in the world today that they didn’t have before.
When I went to the Donbas and saw war with my own eyes, I realized that there’s nothing more important that I could do in my life than to use writing as a political act. Because the reason we got to where we are now is that people did nothing when there was a chance to stop the evil of Putin from growing. I don’t think that all writing needs to be a political act. I hope that all of my writing doesn’t need to be a political act for the rest of my life.
I hope this is just a good story, also.
FICTION
Your Presence is Mandatory
by Sasha Vasilyuk
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published April 23rd, 2024
