'Your Presence Is Mandatory': Connecting Ukraine’s past and present

Your Presence Is Mandatory begins at a Red Army outpost on June 22, 1941, at the start of the German invasion of the USSR, and concludes in war-torn Donetsk, Ukraine, in August 2015, at the outset of another war. In an especially powerful scene tucked into this debut novel, 12-year-old Masha is playing cards with Yefim Shulman, her war veteran grandfather.

They are playing durak, a popular game among people of Russian culture.

When durak (the word means “fool”) is played by the young and the old, sometimes the old just might reveal the difficult truths of their lives, and this is how future writers get inspiration and material for their novels. (I speak from experience: My war veteran grandfather and I were indefatigable durak players, and I am still living off the stories he told me.)

Secret Jewishness

In this durak game in Donetsk in 1995, Yefim unexpectedly reveals his biggest secret, one he had concealed from the KGB and his family, even his wife, for 50 years. He confesses to having been captured by the Nazis and that he spent the war as an Ostarbeiter, an enslaved “worker from the East.” 

Being an Ostarbeiter and working in Germany’s factories and on farms was not a path the Nazis designated for Jews who were to be killed or kept under guard for as long as they were able to work. Since a simple examination could reliably guide selections, few Jewish men were able to deceive their captors, join the Ostarbeiter track, and possibly survive.

Not only did Yefim have to hide his Jewishness from the Germans, but liberation by the Red Army brought on another threat. Comrade Stalin didn’t trust former POWs, believing that being captured was the result of cowardice (the soldier failed to do away with himself) and that time spent in German captivity further eroded one’s reliability.

After the war, many POWs were dispatched to deforest the taiga, dig canals, and chop permafrost at gold and uranium mines. 

Freed from the Nazis, Yefim was determined not to tempt his Jewish luck and keep his history of German captivity secret. This required considerable skills – and for half a century, Yefim succeeded.

Living in fear

HAVING BEEN raised in Crimea (with roots in Donetsk) and having immigrated to the US as a teenager, author Sasha Vasilyuk is close enough to the story to appreciate its nuances and removed far enough to appreciate its vastness. The result is an exquisitely layered narrative that connects Ukraine’s difficult past with its difficult present.

Traversing time and geography, Your Presence Is Mandatory is a story of survival in Nazi captivity, as well as a family saga that explores the price Yefim pays for keeping his past secret from his family and allowing this big secret to spin off myriad smaller secrets.

In his post-war life, Yefim disappears often, sometimes on expeditions (conveniently, he becomes a geologist), and at one point for reasons having to do with a lovely young woman who lives nearby.

The most compelling episodes in this novel play out in the Soviet-era apartment buildings, dystopian structures we now see disintegrate into piles of scorched rubble in televised images of Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Vasilyuk’s story reminds us that these are places where families struggled, secrets were kept, and, importantly, games of durak played. Yefim’s story of survival and subsequent life of concealment is compelling, granted, but to me the more intriguing character is his wife, Nina, an ethnic Ukrainian who had spent the war in Kyiv, witnessing the Holocaust. 

While Yefim regards his Jewishness as a source of harm in his life, Nina embraces Jewish traditions, takes a post-retirement job as a guard at the Sokhnut, and learns Hebrew. 

Writes Vasilyuk: “Yefim couldn’t stand it. After all, what good did being a Jew ever do him? Even with Nina’s prodding, he neither wanted nor knew how to be a Jew. He’d spent six decades avoiding all it entailed. But now it seemed that [Nina] had decided to rope their granddaughter into her Jewish crusade.”

Masha lives in Moscow, but in August of 1995 she spends a couple of weeks with Yefim and Nina in Donetsk. While learning Ukrainian cross-stitch, Masha asks her grandmother what Yefim did during the war. Would he be willing to tell her?

“You can try,” says Nina, who knows only that her husband falls silent the instant the war is brought up. “Maybe he will tell you something, since you are his favorite.”

Nina has no idea that her husband had spent his entire post-war life in terror of the KGB finding out that he had been a POW. While penalties for having been taken prisoner had been reduced over the years, the consequences didn’t fully go away.

Also, unbeknown to the family, Yefim was found out when the KGB discovered inconsistencies in his military records and demanded that he write an explanatory letter. After Yefim complied, he was informed that as a POW he would not qualify for a military pension.

Now we return to the durak game. 

Responding to his granddaughter’s question, Yefim lowers his cards to his chest and, for the first time, confesses: “I was taken prisoner right after the war started.” 

Does Masha comprehend the significance of what she has heard? Would she ask to know more?

She doesn’t. Over the week that follows, while Yefim anticipates her questions, Masha focuses on her homework, her courtyard friends, and helping her grandmother cook for Rosh Hashanah. 

“Then she returned to Moscow and a year later immigrated with her mother to California,” writes Vasilyuk. “And all the while Yefim wondered whether he had told her anything at all.”

The storylines come together after Yefim’s death, when the family, rifling through a scuffed-up leather suitcase he kept locked under the bed, finds a 1984 summons from the Donetsk Region of the KGB mandating that Yefim explain the inconsistencies in his military record.

“Your presence is mandatory,” the summons reads. 

The writer is the author of, most recently, The Dissident, published by Picador. He is president of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union.

YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY

By Sasha Vasilyuk

Bloomsbury Publishing

317 pages; $21.50