More than eighty years after the fact, it’s difficult for Jews to pick “the good guys” of World War II. On one side is Hitler and his Holocaust. On the other is Stalin and his Night of the Murdered Poets and the doctors’ plot.
In the 1940s, however, if you were a Soviet citizen, regardless of your nationality (the USSR considered Jews a nationality, not a religion), your choice was clear: You were to fight for Mother Russia, against the Germans. You were to do so to the death. Being taken prisoner was the same as actively supporting the enemy’s war effort. It was an act of treason. Even living under German occupation whispered of suspected collaboration.
The more tangled the political conflict, the more we tend to split all issues neatly into right and wrong. In Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory, however, nuance is the name of the game.
Nina, the book’s protagonist, spends her youth in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, and the rest of her professional life is haunted by her shame. In the USSR, anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped in German-occupied territory is seen as a traitor. Her husband, Yefim, fights bravely for his country — until he is captured and sent to a POW camp. He escapes and spends the bulk of the war as a slave laborer in a German family’s mechanical workshop. His crime is even worse than Nina’s — he’s considered a collaborator, and thus ineligible for a soldier’s pension and other perks otherwise allocated to veterans.
Nina is unable to hide her scandalous past. Yefim leaps on a golden opportunity to lie about his wartime service, and lives the rest of his life terrified of being discovered, arrested, and punished. The disgrace could destroy not only him, but also his wife, their children, and their grandchildren. It could cost them their jobs, their homes, their chances of higher education, and even their lives.
The book incorporates multiple timelines: in the present day, Yefim and Nina deal with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent turmoil in Donbass, Ukraine; soon after World War II, Yefim and Nina meet and begin a relationship; and during the Great Patriotic War, a teenage Yefim does whatever he needs to in order to survive.
This provides an unusual context for readers. As we read about Yefim in battle and as a POW, we already know he will live and lie about it for decades. As we encounter the courtship of Yefim and Nina, we already know these young lovers will grow into cantankerous old people.
We learn in the first chapter that Yefim dies without telling his family the truth, leaving behind only a written confession. In a world where, thanks to modern media, we can instantly find out what has happened, a book like Your Presence Is Mandatory reminds us that it can take a lifetime to untangle why.
Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her latest historical fiction, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region chronicles a little known aspect of Soviet and Jewish history. Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1977. Visit her website at: www.AlinaAdams.com.
