A riveting debut novel of family secrets, based on real events, about a Jewish, Ukrainian veteran with a secret that could land him in the gulag, and his wife and children who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them.
Yefim Shulman, husband, father, grandfather, and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow finds an old letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession letter reveals what he'd hidden from all who knew him.
Your Presence Is Mandatory moves between Yefim's struggles as a Ukrainian Jew in Hitler's Germany, his years concealing from the Soviet authorities and his family the choices he made to survive the war, and the effect his coverup had on the lives of his wife Nina and two children in Donbas, Ukraine between WWII and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
From Germany's prison camps and forced labor system to the Soviet culture of pride and paranoia, Sasha Vasilyuk grapples with the crushing weight of history on one family, and what grace they find in the course of their survival.
