Pub­lished last year to crit­i­cal acclaim, Sasha Vailyuk’s Your Pres­ence Is Manda­to­ry has just come out in paper­back with a gor­geous, haunt­ing cov­er. Ali­na Adams spoke with Vasi­lyuk about the fam­i­ly his­to­ry behind her nov­el, writ­ing about Sovi­et Jew­ish expe­ri­ences, and the respons­es she’s received about the book.

Ali­na Adams: After years of writ­ing non fic­tion, what made you piv­ot to fiction?

Sasha Vasi­lyuk: I’ve always want­ed to write fic­tion. For years, I was just afraid to. So in a way, non­fic­tion was the piv­ot and fic­tion was the cor­rec­tion back to the orig­i­nal course. 

AA: Why did you think now was the right time for Your Pres­ence is Manda­to­ry?

SV: I start­ed writ­ing the nov­el in 2017 when I moved to Berlin. This was after I’d vis­it­ed the war-torn Don­bas region where WWII his­to­ry was being used as pro­pa­gan­da. The links between WWII and what was hap­pen­ing in Ukraine in the late 2010s, as per­son­i­fied by my fam­i­ly, seemed nov­e­l­esque. I worked on the book for the next four years and hap­pened to fin­ish it in Feb­ru­ary 2022, about a week before Russia’s inva­sion of Ukraine. Scar­i­ly per­fect tim­ing. In a way, I wish Your Pres­ence Is Manda­to­ry was less relevant.

AA: I know that the inspi­ra­tion for the book came from fam­i­ly his­to­ry, but how much did you have to research? 

SV: A lot! I had very scant infor­ma­tion to go on in terms of fam­i­ly his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly about my Jew­ish grand­fa­ther who was the inspi­ra­tion behind the main pro­tag­o­nist. All he left behind was a one and a half ‑page con­fes­sion let­ter to the KGB, which was the seed of my nov­el. So while the skele­ton of the book is based on real facts, I had to spend a lot of time research­ing to fill in the ​“meat” of the story.

AA: Did you ever, like me, come upon a sit­u­a­tion where fam­i­ly his­to­ry did­n’t match the exist­ing his­tor­i­cal record? How did you rec­ti­fy that?

SV: I’ve actu­al­ly come across the oppo­site issue: where some Sovi­et-born peo­ple think that cer­tain small things ​“couldn’t have been pos­si­ble.” Except they were! I think that speaks to the pre­sumed uni­for­mi­ty of the Sovi­et expe­ri­ence – we think what hap­pened to us must have been the same as every­one else – but life in that vast empire actu­al­ly wasn’t as uni­form as we often think. So I’ve learned to trust the doc­u­ments and the wit­ness­es of the actu­al events over peo­ple who think they know. 

AA: What sort of respons­es did you get to the sto­ry from Sovi­et immi­grants ver­sus Amer­i­can and oth­er readers?

SV: West­ern read­ers, espe­cial­ly Jew­ish ones, tend to feel that this nov­el com­pletes a miss­ing piece of the puz­zle. So many know about what hap­pened to their rel­a­tives dur­ing the Shoah, but lit­tle to noth­ing about those who stayed behind the Iron Curtain. 

The Sovi­et immi­grant read­ers, on the oth­er hand, are some­times resis­tant to read­ing it – ​“because we already know every­thing.” But once they do, they are tremen­dous­ly touched that this sto­ry— which is so sim­i­lar to their sto­ry— has been put into a book and pub­lished across sev­er­al coun­tries. Now they want their kids and grand­kids to read it!

AA: Eliz­a­beth Gilbert pulled the pub­li­ca­tion of her Sovi­et-set his­tor­i­cal fic­tion because she did­n’t want it to come off as ​“pro-Russ­ian.” Was that ever an issue for you in light of the Ukraine invasion?

SV: Yes, I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about talk­ing to my son about the war while con­tin­u­ing to teach him Russ­ian (my native lan­guage). While many in Ukraine speak Russ­ian – even today, even in pub­lic – my piece and, by prox­im­i­ty, my nov­el angered some Ukraini­ans on the inter­net. Luck­i­ly, those Ukraini­ans who’ve actu­al­ly read the book, tend to be very touched by it.

AA: Why do you think we’ve seen such an increase in recent years of books from Sovi­et born Jew­ish authors?

SV: Because we’ve got things to say! Or maybe, because we final­ly learned Eng­lish! But seri­ous­ly, there are a cou­ple mil­lion of us, so after a few writ­ers paved the way (Gary Shteyn­gart, Lara Vap­n­yar, Iri­na Reyn, you), the slight­ly younger gen­er­a­tion was bound to give it a go. The Sovi­et Union was one of the most rad­i­cal exper­i­ments in human his­to­ry and so much of it has been hid­den or silenced that I think it lends itself well to sto­ry­telling. And then there is the immi­gra­tion expe­ri­ence and the com­pli­cat­ed Jew­ish iden­ti­ty to explore. So much mate­r­i­al at our fingertips! 

AA: Are there top­ics you think Sovi­et Jew­ish writ­ers aren’t cov­er­ing that they should? Why do you think that is?

SV: I think at first, a lot of Sovi­et Jew­ish writ­ers focused more on the immi­gra­tion expe­ri­ence rather than on sto­ries set in the coun­tries of the for­mer Sovi­et Union. That meant that read­ers who search for ​“nov­els set in Rus­sia” or ​“nov­els set in Ukraine” inevitably come across books like A Gen­tle­man in Moscow and oth­er nov­els writ­ten by Amer­i­can authors who have nev­er slept in a com­mu­nal apart­ment or cooked a sin­gle pot of borsch. In the past few years, that has start­ed to change and I’m glad. 

AA: What’s next for you?

SV: After a most­ly (though not com­plete­ly) his­tor­i­cal nov­el, I’m turn­ing my pen (or rather, key­board) to the con­tem­po­rary world, where a young Sovi­et Jew­ish immi­grant finds her­self ensnared in the Kremlin’s polit­i­cal games in order to help her father. It is my attempt to fig­ure out how our per­son­al, eth­nic, and nation­al iden­ti­ties inter­sect. Wish me luck untan­gling it all!