Your Presence Is Mandatory

November 1, 2023

Award-winning journalist Vasilyuk makes her debut with a story inspired by the life of her grandfather. Ukrainian World War II veteran Yefim Shulman sacrificed much to survive the war. After his death, his family has to contend with the secrets he kept when they find a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. With an 80K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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February 12, 2024
Vasilyuk’s impressive debut chronicles the tribulations of a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran and his widow’s distress in the early stages of the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War. Yefim Shulman, 18, is stationed in Lithuania with the Red Army in 1941 when he’s injured during a surprise nighttime attack. Later, he and his fellow survivors are ambushed and forced to work in a series of labor camps. After spending four years in captivity, he rejoins the Red Army in Niegripp and takes part in the invasion of Berlin. Back in Ukraine after the war, he marries bookish Nina. Looming over their life together is Stalin’s Order No. 270, which labels as a traitor anyone who fell captive to the Germans. Forced to lie for his survival, Yefim tells people he was never imprisoned. Throughout, Vasilyuk alternates the narration between Yefim, who dies in 2007, and Nina, who lives in Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2015. In a poignant moment, she reflects how, after surviving famine and WWII, she never thought she’d see the town she lived in for most of her life destroyed from within by separatists. This is a reverberating exploration of guilt, trauma, and the turbulent history between Ukraine and Russia. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary.

February 15, 2024
Nina buries her husband Yefim in Ukraine in 2007. Their relationship was complicated by secrets harbored since WWII, and when a KGB letter from 1984 surfaces, Nina realizes that a false foundation underpinned what she thought she knew about her husband of 50 years. The story rewinds to Yefim's wartime experiences fighting the Nazis as a Jewish artillerist, slowly unspooling a lose-lose situation with generational effects. Ukrainian-born Vasilyuk draws on her family background to illuminate the personal, cultural, and experiential. Nina muses that her parents grew up under the Romanovs and she and Yefim under Stalin; "how could their idea of romance--or even of life itself--be anything alike?" There is wry humor. The couple's son studies psychology, and they beg him for a more practical profession than "listening to people's problems in a country where most people's problem was the country itself." Full of devastating pathos and elucidation of how war and, especially, fascist and communist mindsets destroy one's humanity, this timely novel is a robust addition to the growing body of literature chronicling the Ukrainian experience.

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April 1, 2024
A Ukrainian soldier survives World War II to face a lifetime of secrets. When Yefim Shulman goes off to war, he imagines himself fighting for glory, honor, and other ideals. It's 1941, and Yefim is a young Ukrainian artilleryman from a Jewish family stationed on the border between Germany and the Soviet Union. The realities of not only war, but of Stalinist politics--including Stalin's hand in the famine Yefim's family barely survived--soon come barreling toward Yefim not unlike cannon fire. Chapters set during the war alternate with chapters set much later; to begin with, Yefim, as an old man, has just died, and among his papers, his wife has found a letter to the KGB that seems to indicate that much of what he has told his family about his wartime experiences was untrue. Vasilyuk, a journalist as well as a debut novelist, sets out to comb through all this with patience, subtlety, and finesse, and she is occasionally successful. Various challenges get in her way, however. For one thing, she has an unfortunate penchant for describing warfare with cliches ("the bombs dropped with blood-chilling shrieks") and a worse habit of describing Soviet or German characters by way of American idioms they never would have used themselves ("He must have been one lucky son of a gun"). Still, these are small complaints, easy to forgive. Less so are the way the action sags as the novel plods along and the way the characters never quite spring to life, no matter how many puppet-style strings Vasilyuk pulls. Despite its subject matter, the novel lacks urgency and is overly reliant on other novels set in the Soviet period.

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