San Francisco author Sasha Vasilyuk has been on an intense journey writing her debut novel about a Ukrainian Jewish World War II veteran with a perilous secret that has long-lasting, life-altering repercussions for himself and his family.
“It’s been a hell of an emotional ride,” said Vasilyuk on a recent Zoom session presented by San Francisco’s Jewish Community Library, the final (virtual) stop on her tour to launch the already well-received historical novel.
“Your Presence Is Mandatory” (Bloomsbury, $26, 336 pages), released in April, tells the story of Yefim Shulman, whose wife and daughter find a mysterious letter addressed to the KGB among his belongings after he dies at age 84.
After reading an opening section of the book with that detail, Vasilyuk, who emigrated to the U.S. at 13 after living in Russia and Ukraine, said a similar thing happened in her family: “My real grandfather was a Jewish Ukrainian WWII survivor who never talked about the war.”
He made it to Berlin, which she later learned, was “code for being a war hero.” But the family knew few details about his life during the period.
When he died in 2007, she said, “I immediately thought there was a novel here,” but didn’t feel an urgency at the time to write about WWII.
That didn’t happen until 2016, after she and her brother snuck into Donetsk, the industrial Ukrainian city where the book is set, where her grandmother lived and where she spent summers as a child.
The visit shook her up: “I never thought war would come to Europe in the 21st century,” she said, describing the intensity of hearing “dead quiet broken by the sound of shelling” while being the only humans out on the street minutes before a 9 p.m. curfew.
“It gave me the confidence that writing about war was something I could do,” she said, thinking, “Our grandfathers won victory and so will we.”
A year later, she started writing the book, at the time knowing, she said, nothing about the millions of POWs living in occupied Ukraine, or about Ostarbeiter, the millions of Eastern Europeans forced into slave labor; many were women doing domestic work in the homes of their enemies.
Knowing Russian helped immensely her in her research to discover why her grandfather went to extremes to hide the story of his survival. She contacted some scholars, used the internet, and communicated with older family members who lived through WWII. Her grandmother’s written memoir provided vivid details about daily life.
Learning more details about Joseph Stalin’s repressive Soviet regime and the prevalence of gulags, she began to understand why her grandfather would hide his history.
Her grandfather’s story, and Yefim’s story in the novel, are not uncommon, she said.
“Everyone has a parent or grandparent that survived World War II,” said, adding that, unlike Germany, the Soviet Union has not reckoned with the past.
“A generation of silence makes it easy for people like Putin to revise history,” she added.
She hopes that the exploration of cultural secrecy in “Your Presence Is Mandatory” sheds light on how “democracy can slip away.
“We should be informed,” she continued. “Talk to your grandparents. Love is stronger than fear and shame.”