Your Presence is Mandatory is about the futility and senselessness of war.
Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel tells the story of a whole region and its people, ancestors of the Ukrainians who now struggle to drive Russia from their land. The book covers a long period of time—1941 to 2015. The beginning pages introduce an extensive cast of characters, so many that I was a bit confused at first. But soon we zero in on protagonist Yefim Shulman. Yefim is Jewish at a time when German dictator Adolf Hitler has decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe. In 1932, Ukraine experienced a famine, called Holodomor. Yefim was a young teenager when starving peasants roamed the streets of his village. Eight years later, Ukraine is still a part of the Soviet Union, so he joins the Red Army. He considers it the right thing to do and believes in Joseph Stalin. I was fascinated by Yefim’s account of how he became a POW, experiencing shame for years at his inability to rejoin the other Russian troops. Gradually, he loses his faith in Stalin and concludes, “Even their Soviet regime that purported to care about the common man didn’t care one bit. The only way to live within it was to figure out how to use its rules to get what he needed.”
When granddaughter Masha asks Yefim’s wife Nina how there could have been no food in 1932—“Didn’t the peasants grow things in the villages?” – Nina describes Holodomor: “The government took their harvest. Our country had a lot of secrets, and we’re only beginning to learn about them now.”
Yefim has a secret too, a secret he hides for five decades: “This was no time to think about the past, his or anyone’s. They first had to survive the present.” Survive the present. These words still describe life in Russia. The need for survival is a recurring theme in Vasilyuk’s novel.
The action unfolds in Stalino (Donetsk), Ukraine, where Yefim was raised in a hut with six older brothers and one sister, and in Lithuania and Latvia, where he is captured in 1941, Other locations are Niegripp and Karow in Germany, where he spends time in a work camp. A smooth operator, he manages to escape not once but twice.
Yefim makes it to Berlin in 1944 and notices, with horror, the looting that is being conducted by his compatriots, for instance, “a shiny Mercedes being loaded on a train to Russia,” and cringes at the “revenge rapes.” He disparages the Red Army, all the while pardoning the soldiers’ behavior because he still believes in the Soviet Union at this point.
The chapter on his return to his village after the war is particularly moving. Stalino has been devastated. His parents’ hut is empty, dashing his hope of a reunion.
Vasilyuk also gives us an especially compelling scene when a television anchor reports news of the war in Chechnya. Ten-year-old granddaughter Masha comments that she does not understand why men wage war, that she could not imagine killing anyone, and for the first time Yefim is glad at how little fighting he did during the Second World War.
Toward the end of the novel, Nina wonders, “Maybe their whole generation was wrong to be so secretive. Maybe what they needed to do was talk about all the complicated ways in which they had survived. About the nuances of real life that weren’t pretty enough to make it into history books.” Such true words!
Vasilyuk based her novel on the history of her family. Your Presence is Mandatory feels timely since Russian soldiers today are kidnapping Ukrainian children, raping Ukrainian women, and looting the Ukrainian towns they conquer now that the United States Congress has dragged its feet for so long on sending ammunition and weaponry.
Your Presence is Mandatory helped me understand today’s conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Do read this important book!
