Your Presence is Mandatory by Sasha Vasilyuk

Posted by d'Ettaquette

Nineteen-year-old Yefim Shulman was a simple guy. He loved good times, wicked women, and strong vodka. Nothing, however, paralleled Yefim’s adoration for the USSR. In 1941, Yefim proudly served in the Red Army’s artillery unit. He dreamed, returning a war hero. When his unit was ambushed, Yefim became a POW in Germany and remained a prisoner for the duration of the war. Now after his death, his widow discovers a letter to the KGB, a confession Yefim guarded for seven decades.

 

A compelling new novel by author Sasha Vasilyuk, Your Presence is Mandatory showcases the choice of one soldier who opted to live instead of taking the bullet for The Homeland. When he left his village to join the army, Yefim hoped for a triumphant return, basking in glory, decorated with medals, victorious over the Nazi invaders in his beloved county. Yefim naïvely placed his faith in Stalin, “The Man of Steel,” leader of the USSR. A true believer in the promise of communism, with its underlying Marxist ideology - equity for everyone including for Jews like himself - Yefim had one goal: “All I wanted to do is fight.”

 

He joined the Red Army in Lithuania losing two fingers in a surprise ambush, which killed most of his regiment. Captured, taken into a German labor camp, and subsequently sent to a work farm, Yefim finds himself a prisoner in a totalitarian state whose objective is to murder all Jews. A “Yid,” how can Yefim survive in “The Reich?” Did he become a Nazi collaborator? A spy? When, decades later, Yefim receives an order from the KBG questioning “inconsistencies” in his army record, he has only one option.  

 

Inspired by her grandfather’s war years, Vasilyuk adroitly “connects the past to the present,” and clarifies the origins of President Putin’s attack on Ukraine, in February 2022. Vasilyuk focuses on the stigma in the life of a soldier who dared survive as a prisoner of war and his effort at repatriation at war’s end. Under Stalin’s regime, any soldier was tainted as a traitor, shamed as a coward, his honor depleted, and life reduced to worthless flotsam if he failed to “absorb the bullet” for The Motherland. What did Yefim’s records show? And to what did he confess? 

 

It’s a sure fire bet Russian President Putin wouldn’t scramble to buy this remarkable novel. Its devastating history brings to life the sources of the Russo/Ukrainian conflict and the folly of embracing the flawed ideology of ruthless dictators past or present.