The figure at the center of Sasha Vasilyuk’s stunning debut novel Your Presence is Mandatory is Yefim Shulman: a veteran, academic, and patriarch of a Ukrainian Jewish family. Following his death, Yefim’s family discovers that he had been taken prisoner by the Nazis while serving in World War II, a secret he had kept his entire adult life. Shocked and confused, his family must now reckon with what this discovery reveals about their father, their country, and themselves.

Vasilyuk, who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine as a preteen, traverses the time between the onset of World War II and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, effortlessly blending stories from her family’s real-life experiences with compelling narrative fiction. Zelda Zerkel-Morris met with Vasilyuk for The National to discuss her writing process, memory and noticing as an author, and her upcoming project.

Q So to start off, I wonder if this idea first came to you as fiction. I recognize that you have a background in journalism and the novel has its roots in a true story.

A That's a great question. The idea came from the letter that my grandfather had written to the KGB, which we discovered after he died. I remember at the time thinking that this could be a novel. I just didn't think that I was going to be the one to write it for a very long time, for 10 years, really. I don't think there was a way to do it as nonfiction, given how little information there was about his particular story, and also, overall, the experience of prisoners of war, and specifically Jewish prisoners of war. There is just not as much as you would need for narrative nonfiction.

Q Let’s talk about the research process. You mentioned in your author's note how little you had been taught about things like Ostarbeiters and the Jewish prisoners of war growing up in Russia and Ukraine. What was it like to uncover these truths that had been kept from you as a child?

A Once I discovered that my grandfather was a prisoner of war, all I knew was that I was supposed to feel ashamed. I couldn't explain why and couldn't trace the source of that idea. Then, when I began researching the book, I discovered a lot that was shocking about Soviet history that helped me understand the source of my shame as well as illuminated the current war in Ukraine.

As an example, I had grown up with this Soviet idea of brotherhood, how all the countries that made up the Union were all brother nations. Not unlike the states in the United States. Obviously, that's not the case right now, because we have this war between Russia and Ukraine, and that rupture of the myth of brotherhood feels very shocking. But when I was doing research for my book, I saw that same kind of lack of fraternal feelings in the period during the WWII. When all of these Soviet people were captured and kept in Germany, they didn't necessarily have a sense of unity. It was often easier to give somebody up – to give up a fellow countryman - to benefit yourself. Learning that sad fact about your country’s history is saddening and kind of eye-opening.

Q And that kind of mirrors the journey Yefim goes on throughout the book and how his relationship with communism and the Soviet Union changes.

A Exactly. There is a scene where Yefim is running away from a labor camp with his friend Ivan, and they come upon a Belarusian Ostarbeiter who calls the German police on them. That's actually a real thing that happened to my grandfather. I remember reading that for the first time in his letter to the KGB and feeling, like, that makes no sense, how could it be? Aren’t we all brothers? But once I started researching the true history versus the honky-dory Soviet propaganda I grew up on, I saw that betrayal was quite common. And in a way, that helps see the war between Russia and Ukraine in a new light.

Q I'm so glad that you brought up the current Russian invasion in Ukraine, especially as we're coming up on now on the third anniversary. I was curious what it was like writing war scenes in the digital age, while we have so much access to these awful images coming out of Ukraine. As a reader, there was almost a surreal feeling reading about the devastation of World War II while there is still a war going on.

A The war scenes were the ones I worried about the most. I've never been a soldier. It's probably the farthest experience from my life that I can fathom. That's one of the reasons why I didn't work on this book for 10 years after I had the initial idea, but going to Ukraine in 2016 changed that. I was visiting my grandmother and the war had been going on in the Donbas for two years by that point. One night while walking home, I heard shelling, and there was something about that experience that gave me confidence to write this book from the perspective of a soldier. I think it was that I felt a fear that was very different from any other fears I've ever felt. I’d even call it a terror. As I researched the book, terror was the most commonly cited experience of every soldier. It's a terror that seems to be unlike any other in the life of a human being. It's very specific to the experience of war. And once I experienced a very tiny hint of that same fear myself, I felt more confidence in being able to capture a young soldier thrust into the biggest war in human history.

Q I think that’s something that the book illustrates so well too, that the effects and realities of war don't only exist on the battlefield, and there's so much loss and trauma that's experienced by people who aren't soldiers. I’m also thinking specifically about the scene when Yefim returns to his village.

A Returning to a place that’s completely different and seeing the effect of war on civilian life was part of my experience in the Donbas. The city of my grandmother wasn’t as destroyed as the scene I show in my novel when Yefim returns to Ukraine, but the psychology of seeing your booming hometown turn into a hellhole was similar enough. I also read a lot and watched footage of what it was like in WWII to return to a place that's completely destroyed. What I find unique about the current war in Ukraine is that a big part of its trauma is that memory of loss from WWII that still hasn't faded. There's actually a lot of stories of how this war brings up history because it's happening on the very same land. There have been old bodies and old ammunition from World War II that have been found during this war. So it feels very much like an echo of history, which is why I structured my book so that it covers not just WWII but history all the way to the current war.

Q That’s also something I was curious about: the different reactions you’ve received from Americans and from people with Soviet backgrounds.

A I would say every Soviet person thus far has reacted to it in a very emotional way, and almost always told me a story that was in some way similar from their own family. Secrecy was a huge part of everyone’s Soviet experience. Hearing these stories really confirmed for me that while on the one hand, this is a unique story, it captures a universally Soviet experience of having someone in your family who hid something from you. And in that WWII generation specifically, who suffered from trauma and who felt too ashamed and afraid to talk about it. Obviously that is not something that I hear from every Western reader, and yet I actually do hear similar stories of people of that same generation not talking about their experience. I actually just got a letter from a German reader whose grandfather was a soldier captured by the USSR, so the reverse of Yefim. He also never talked about it. I was so glad that a German person read my book and wrote me this letter. That's sort of the point of my book: that you accept that yes, our predecessors did awful things to each other, but that already happened. We can't change it. The only thing we can do now is to understand their experience, understand the experience of the people on whom they inflicted the suffering, and kind of understand both sides, come to terms with it, learn from it, and hopefully, become a better society, right?

Q I know that you started writing the book in Berlin. Do you feel like the location you’re in when you’re writing has an impact on your creative process? Especially in a place like Berlin, which is ripe with so much history.

A Yes, I definitely felt very compelled to begin writing the book because I was in Berlin. The gist of the story was in the back of my mind, but I really felt possessed to write it only when I arrived in Berlin. I was writing an essay on this, about writing this somewhat Jewish book in Berlin, and my writing group kept asking, “Well, were you paying extra attention to WWII stuff because you were working on the book?” And that's a valid question, right? Your perception works in strange ways. You notice things you need and ignore things that don’t serve you or don’t interest you, and so when you’re writing or thinking intensely about something, the world changes its shape around you.

But I also find myself working against the grain. I'm in this cozy, sunny life in San Francisco in a quiet residential neighborhood. And while part of my next book is set here, a big part of it is set in Moscow at a different time, when life was very much the opposite of here, and a lot more intense. There are protests, there's Putin, it's dark and cold. My fictional world is basically the opposite of my real one. And so I guess places can have both of these effects.

Q Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem People plays a big role in the story. I was curious if you knew about it before, or stumbled upon it in your research.

A I learned about this poem from my aunt, who inspired the Vita character, Yefim’s daughter. My aunt memorized that poem in high school and it just kind of accompanied her through life. She never forgot it, but she didn't know why. She read it at her father’s funeral, in the same way I have in the opening scene of my book. And then, when she discovered the truth about her father from the letter, the poem was the first thing she thought about. I thought it was such a brilliant detail that of course I included it in the novel.

Q Since Yefim and Nina are based on your grandparents and the story is so rooted in your family, I wondered if you had a family memory or story you wanted to share with our readers before we go.

A I visited my grandparents in Donetsk every summer, and it was a very nice break from Moscow life, which was a lot harder and more hectic. So I’ll share one image, which isn’t in the book, but it's something that, for some reason, is stuck in my head. They were doing the laundry, and since they didn’t have a drier and air-dried everything, things were sometimes stiff and wrinkly. One time, my grandparents were washing a bed sheet, and once it was dry, my grandma grabbed the sheet on one side, and my grandfather grabbed it on the other side. And they did this dance of pulling the sheet back and forth to straighten the wrinkles. But they really had to work in tandem, and they were so good at it, at this little dance that required coordination. I remember watching them and what I saw was a couple that had known each other for very very long and knew how to do things without words.

Zelda Zerkel-Morris holds a BA in history with a focus on Eastern Europe and the experience of Slavic-American immigrants from DePaul University. Her senior thesis, “Stitches in Air: Media Erasure of Immigrant Labor during the Gilded Age Lace Fad” was featured in the DePaul University History Conference.