Yefim Shulman is a man of secrets. He is also a man who tries very hard to make it look like he has no secrets. Secrets are a very dangerous thing to have in the paranoia of the Soviet Union. We know what Yefim’s secret is very early in Sasha Vasilyuk’s affecting novel, Your Presence is Mandatory: shortly after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Yefim was one of millions of Red Army troops taken prisoner. Where prisoners of war are, in other countries, viewed with sympathy and, perhaps, relief that they were out of combat, Soviet authorities viewed their POWs as tainted by contact with the West. They were viewed as traitors for “letting” themselves be captured instead of killed and thousands were sent to the gulags or worse. Josef Stalin took such a hard line against POWs that he did not try to rescue his own captured son, who later died at Sachsenhausen.
Vasilyuk tells Yefim’s stories from two perspectives. One perspective follows Yefim as he tries his best to survive Nazi captivity after his capture shortly after the Soviet Union was invaded through 1945, when he was able to rejoin the Red Army and fight in the Battle of Berlin. The other perspective, interwoven with the chapters about Yefim’s captivity, tells his story from the 1950s to his death in the 2000s. Even with the chapters that show Yefim, alive and well, after the war, Yefim comes so close to death that, more than once, I wondered if the chapters of his later life were a kind of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” death vision. Pure, dumb luck saves Yefim as often as the kindness of German civilians.
Yefim’s later life is also a life of laying low and trying to hide from the authorities—the Soviets instead of the Nazis now. He avoids talking about how he spent the war, even though his children and others clamor for stories of heroism from the man who was in the army “from the invasion to Berlin.” Millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors, and pilots never made it back that, with the patriotic fervor surrounding the Soviet victories in World War II, there is a lot of clamoring. Yefim’s secrecy about the war (and his flirtations and his friendship with another, less lucky POW) taints his relationships with his wife and children. He can never drop his hypervigilance. He can never drop his fears of the Soviet government, even when attitudes towards POWs started to shift in the 1990s.
Your Presence is Mandatory is the kind of war story I seek out. It tells a story we rarely hear about. This isn’t a story of triumph or heroism. It’s a story of fear and trauma and hiding. It’s a story of being a prisoner, literally under the Nazis and figuratively under the Soviets. I realize that I’m making this novel sound grim—and there are some genuinely grim passages—but I found this book to be fascinatingly honest. Readers who enjoy novels set during and around the Second World War will like that this book offers something new. I also think that readers who like deep historical dives will be drawn into this novel.