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March 3, 2025 in Library Corner
By Robin Jacobson.
After Sasha Vasilyuk’s grandfather died in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2007, her grandmother made a shocking discovery. In an old briefcase stashed under a bed, she found a confession letter her husband had written for the Soviet KGB in the 1980s. The letter upended everything she thought she knew about her husband’s military service during World War II.
The letter and its stunning revelations inspired Vasilyuk’s stirring novel, Your Presence is Mandatory, about a Jewish Ukrainian soldier, Yefim Shulman, and the secrets he kept to survive within the Soviet state. Like the best historical novels, Your Presence illuminates both the past and the present. It offers a window into the 20th century Soviet experience while also spotlighting President Vladimir Putin’s 21st century repurposing of Soviet propaganda to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The novel traces the lives of Yefim Shulman and his family over seven decades – from 1941 through 2015 – alternating chapters set during World War II with chapters that take place after the war. Born into a large Jewish family in a Ukrainian village, Yefim is an 18-year-old Soviet artilleryman when Nazi Germany launches Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Within weeks of this surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, Yefim is captured by Hitler’s army. Like thousands of Soviet soldiers across the wide war front, he has no choice but to surrender.
Readers follow Yefim into a horrible German POW camp and later into northern Germany, where he works as a slave laborer. Soviet POWs did not have a good survival rate under the Nazis, and Yefim’s chances of surviving, as a Jew trying to hide his ethnicity, were even slimmer. Still, the brave, clever, determined, and lucky Yefim does survive and even manages to rejoin the Soviet forces marching on Berlin in 1945 as the war draws to a close.
Yefim’s troubles did not end with his return to his homeland. As Vasilyuk shows, Soviet POWs did not fit with the mythology Joseph Stalin spun about the “Great Patriotic War” in which the mighty Red Army gloriously triumphed over Nazi Germany.
Rather than treating POWs as heroes who suffered in service to the nation, Stalin deemed them cowards and quitters who had betrayed their country. POWs were not only ineligible for veterans’ benefits, but many were sent to harsh forced-labor camps and then shunned by society when they were released; even the children of POWs were excluded from good schools and jobs. How Yefim avoided this fate, and instead won admiration as a war hero who “made it all the way to Berlin,” is revealed over the course of the novel.
The secret of his wartime past weighs on Yefim and affects his relationship with his wife, Nina, and children. Nina has her own difficult past, but hers is not secret. Like Yefim, she suffered through the Holodomor, the Soviet-manufactured mass famine of 1932-1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians, possibly intentionally. Nina’s struggles continued during World War II when the Nazis occupied her city of Kyiv. The Soviet government compounded this misfortune after the war by stamping her identification papers with the stigmatizing phrase, “lived in occupied territory.” This marked her as untrustworthy, even a suspected collaborator, and severely limited her opportunities.
Yefim and Nina’s experiences form part of the backstory to the current Russia-Ukraine war, suggesting why the notion of reuniting with Russia appalls most Ukrainians. Moreover, the novel reveals how Putin has revived and weaponized Soviet mythology surrounding the Great Patriotic War. Declaring Ukrainians to be the new Nazis, Putin rallies Russian citizens to war against them.
