Diasporas scatter a people like seeds in the wind, but first a fracturing of the whole community occurs. In her debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory, Sasha Vasilyuk, who was born in the Soviet Crimea before immigrating to San Francisco at age 13, uses the story of Yefim Shulman, an infantryman in the Great Patriotic War (otherwise known as World War II) to illustrate that it’s not just community that shatters.
“And if someone dies / there dies with him his first snow, / and first kiss, and first fight,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in his poem “People.” At Yefim’s funeral, his widow, Nina, listens as their daughter reads those lines at the graveside. The poem becomes a palimpsest over which Vasilyuk frames her narrative; Yevtushenko’s words about the loss of a loved one also refer to losing access to the personal stories we were never told.
After a mourning period, Nina and her daughter discover a letter from Yefim to the KGB stating that he would like to address the “inconsistencies” in his military service record. His family is mystified: What could their patriarch, who went on to become a respected geologist, have done? To address that question, Vasilyuk’s narrative moves back and forth between Nina and Yefim’s wartime experiences and their family life afterward.
As both a Jew and a Soviet citizen loyal to Joseph Stalin, Yefim has a divided self. His last name clearly identifies his heritage, and despite his atheism, arouses the antisemitism of his army compatriots. When he returns to his village after the Allies’ victory, he finds that most of his extended family—along with an estimated 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine—have been slaughtered by the Einsatzgruppen.
Yefim is tormented by survivor’s guilt, not least because he has killed off parts of himself to survive the war. Taken prisoner by the Nazis, he had no choice but to hide his identity in order to not be killed. After his release, he must keep his incarceration secret; to do otherwise would result in punishment by a Soviet state that imprisoned those who “let” themselves be captured. Such actions cause him forever to perform as an imposter even in the company of his most intimate relatives and friends.
It’s clear that part of Yefim’s trauma has to do with his sense that he has failed to meet the expectations of Stalin, whom he once considered a great leader. The war, however, has complicated—eradicated, even—his adulation, and Vasilyuk shows the cost of that transition. When we’ve been living in the dark, the sudden light of truth can be painful, and Yefim suffers because of all that he has come to know. Still, to reveal the truths he learned during the war isn’t possible without exposing his lies to his family and making them objects of suspicion in a deeply paranoid state.
Ukraine was systematically starved during the Holodomor, the Soviet famine that peaked in 1933. This was a man-made horror, created when Stalin took Ukrainian grain from peasants and sent it to other populations. As Nina explains, “We were taught not to ask many questions, only to adore our country and fear its leaders. It’s hard to explain how pride and fear can coexist in one’s heart without contradiction.… We never talked about the really terrible things, especially if those things were done by our own government.”
What she’s saying is that trauma fractures. When survivors put themselves back together, they become mosaics of who they were before. For many, the longing to return to their former selves can be constant. Yefim feels this, as both pain and exhaustion. “He had wanted to purge these memories,” Vasilyuk tells us, “but he hadn’t considered how hard it would be to erase himself.”
Yet it’s not just the war that haunts Yefim. He is also undone by shame. “While we feel even a drop of shame,” Vasilyuk writes, “lying is our only choice.” Such a tension distorts Yefim’s sense of himself as a “real” man, so much so that he lies to his wife about anything that he worries might diminish him, including a car accident in which he is gravely injured. Even as he recognizes Stalin’s failures as a leader or a father figure, he is determined to remain his family’s patriarch.
Diasporas are a tragedy. They are also a survival mechanism that allows far-flung individuals to reestablish themselves in places where they might flourish. Yet as Vasilyuk understands, no matter how necessary the act of reinvention, there is always a price to be paid. In this vivid and engaging novel, she examines not only the fracturing of community, but also of those who persevere.•
Lorraine Berry is a journalist and an editor who has written for the Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, the Guardian, and many other publications.
