This was a solid WWII read that was propelled forward by a mystery that resided at the center of our story, a mystery that we are told at the beginning.

Our POV shifts from the present, where our MC is married with a family & speaks of the war as a thing of the past, & the past of which we get continuous flashbacks of his actual life during the war, which as we get further and further thru his wartime storyline we see the discrepancies between the stories he has told in present time & what we are watching play out in the past, & it is those discrepancies that are at the core of the main conflict in the story, which is ultimately our MC’s inner life & the journey he must undertake to come to terms with the life he has led, the choices he has made, & the lies he has told, having to decide at last whether one can ever truly be free until they are known by their loved ones for who they truly are.

It’s a meaningful story, that’s pretty fast paced and interesting & explores avenues not often examined in WWII fiction—the roles of the Russians. This was a solid 4 star read that hovered between the 4th and 5th star but didn’t cross over into 5 star territory bc despite the interesting subject matter, overall it still felt very much like most WWII fiction that I have read. This was very good but just short of great!

One of my favorite kinds of books is fiction based on facts or a real happening. Sasha Vasilyuk, in her debut novel, includes both a real happening that led her to discover facts to flesh out her work of fiction. In real life, her grandmother discovered a two-page confession letter following her grandfather’s death in 2007 in Donetsk, Ukraine. The letter to the KGB admitted to his capture at the beginning of World War II and the several years he spent in Germany in forced labor. In the Soviet Union becoming a prisoner of war was considered a crime against the state. Her grandfather spent several decades hiding what he saw as a shameful secret.

Sasha grew up in Ukraine and Russia and uses her own background to weave a believable story of Yefim Shulman, her grandfather’s counterpart. A young man in 1941, he is determined to defend his large Jewish family and his country from Hitler’s forces. The primary narration of her story alternates between Yefim and his widow Nina with seventy years of history woven into their lives from post-WWII Ukraine to the present day Russian-Ukrainian War. For his entire life, Yefim carries on his assertion that he was never imprisoned until the confession letter is found after his death. Yet the shadow of his secret hovers over the lives of Yefim, Nina, their children and their grandchildren.

The well-researched book carries the hard stories of survival and equally hard stories of where one’s loyalties should lie. Sasha Vasilyuk captures both characters and place, bringing the hard choices they all had to make to life. Her background as a journalist undoubtedly added to her ability to tell the story realistically. Timeliness of the book with the current Russian-Ukranian conflict adds to its importance.

As a long-time historical fiction fan, I expected to enjoy Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel. I did not anticipate the amount of emotion I would feel, or the historical knowledge I’d gain from this book.

Your Presence is Mandatory spans seventy years of life in the Soviet Union from the perspective of a Jewish Ukrainian man and his family. We follow Yefim from the early days of WWII up to his passing, in a novel that explores how rhetoric of a national victory can complicate personal loss. Yefim witnesses cultural change in the USSR, from Stalin’s reign to the period of glasnost, but he is weighed down by a decision made in the final days of war.

Yefim is a character who is sympathetic behind his mask of indifference. Choosing to live a lie rather than suffer shame from his country and family, he is plagued by guilt. The conviction that he’s made the right choice wanes with age and takes a heavy toll on his family relationships.

This story is told from alternating timelines, giving us a rich and detailed perspective of Yefin’s time in the war and the decades following. We see changes in the Soviet Union though Yefim’s eyes, and gain perspective from his wife Nina, their children, and eventually their grandchildren as well.

I learned so much about the USSR from this book - the Ukrainian famine, the wartime hardships, and the harsh regime that stamped prisoners of war as traitors. Growing up in a country that thrives on miseducation in history, I’m always becoming more aware of what I don’t know. Literature like Your Presence is Mandatory has the power to share stories that have been hidden or forgotten, and add a new level of empathy and context to current issues.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about complex characters, strained family dynamics, and aspects of history that aren’t often discussed.

The research, the context, and the characters were phenomenal. I really liked the way the emotions were conveyed. The historical research behind the war was also well done. Kudos from a neighborhood historian! The perspectives of the characters, especially in flashbacks, were very intriguing. Great Read!

I read this book as an ARC from NetGalley. A novel about the experience of a Ukrainian Jew during WW2, , the book’s emotional power reminded me of my experience reading Jerry Kizinki’s novel The Painted Bird. Written by a first-time novelist after discovering papers written by her grandfather after his death. It describes a young man’s induction into the Soviet army shortly before the invasion by Germany - focusing first on his pride in defending Russia from the German invasion and then on his fight to survive after escaping with his life after the total destruction of his artillery unit by the Luftwaffe. While he escaped with his life, he survived the war as a German POW before escaping and working in German-occupied territory. While he escapes with his life, he loses his brothers, sisters, and father during the war. Emotionally devastated and then sent to Siberia since Stalin regarded POW’s as an embarrassment to his regime. The protagonist is embarrassed by the manner in which he survived the war and holds his secret from his family almost until the moment of his death.

The book manages to also touch on Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine. All in all, I strongly recommend this book highly both to people curious about WW2 as well as understanding the Russian perspective of Ukraine personified first by Stalin and currently by former KGB member and current dictator Vladimir Putin.

The blurb on Netgalley opens with the description. "A riveting debut..." Is it riveting? ABSOLUTELY. It has been a long time since I have been so consumed by a book that I will forgo food and drink because I cannot be bothered. This book is an utterly enthralling, story about a young man during WWII and the secrets he keeps that affect his family generations later. It is a stunning tour-de-force, and I defy anyone who begins reading it to be able to stop. Timely, fascinating, and emotional, I loved every second of it. All the stars!!!

This book is a heartbreaking examination of the weight of secrets. Our main character feels oppressed by the state and by his own internal fears and he keeps his true history from his family. After his death, the family find a letter than explains the real history and are left to grapple with what it means to really know both people and history.
This book handles flashbacks very well. I was always able to tell what timeline and narration we were in. The main characters were all unique and complicated, though some of the side characters blended together. This is a story that follows the horrors of war and state oppression from the 1930s all the way through the fighting in the Donbas in 2015. The two main characters are so defined by their war experiences that the reader is left with a feeling that there is nothing else as certain in the world as men firing weapons.
This is an understated story that I think some will find slow, however, I found it compelling and tragic throughout. The fear was visceral and the stakes were so high that the characters motivations were truly earned and I felt such anxiety whenever the house of cards threatened to fall. Savor this read and you will not regret it.

Note: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion. Thank you, NetGalley and publishers.

Your Presence is Mandatory is a powerful debut work of literary and historical fiction. At its heart it is a story of survival and the human spirit. Spanning from WWII to the present day conflict in Ukraine, one family, and particularly the man who would become the patriarch of the family, Yefim, must make choices to survive and decide where their true loyalties lie, to a country, to each other, to themselves. Please give this one a try! You won’t be disappointed!

I’d been especially eager to read Sasha Vasilyuk’s “Your Presence Is Mandatory,” given my particular interest in World War II born of growing up in a military family in the immediate postwar era, but the novel turned out not to be as engaging for me as I’d hoped, maybe just because I’ve finally surfeited on WWII fiction. Not that the book didn’t hold considerable appeal, with its account of a Ukrainian Jew burdened with a secret about the nature of his wartime service and always dreading a moment of accounting, which in fact finally arrives when he’s called to appear before Soviet authorities (hence the title). But again, maybe because of all the reading I’ve done on the subject, much of the novel's action was pretty familiar terrain for me. Indeed, for all its enumerated horrors, and there are many, including the protagonist losing his thumb and index finger in fierce fighting or helping a German boy only to have to shoot him later, the novel grew somewhat tiresome for me after a time, though it might prove more compelling for someone less versed in the period, and might shed invaluable light on the current Ukraine-Russia situation.

Yefim Shulman is a man of secrets. He is also a man who tries very hard to make it look like he has no secrets. Secrets are a very dangerous thing to have in the paranoia of the Soviet Union. We know what Yefim’s secret is very early in Sasha Vasilyuk’s affecting novel, Your Presence is Mandatory: shortly after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Yefim was one of millions of Red Army troops taken prisoner. Where prisoners of war are, in other countries, viewed with sympathy and, perhaps, relief that they were out of combat, Soviet authorities viewed their POWs as tainted by contact with the West. They were viewed as traitors for “letting” themselves be captured instead of killed and thousands were sent to the gulags or worse. Josef Stalin took such a hard line against POWs that he did not try to rescue his own captured son, who later died at Sachsenhausen.

Vasilyuk tells Yefim’s stories from two perspectives. One perspective follows Yefim as he tries his best to survive Nazi captivity after his capture shortly after the Soviet Union was invaded through 1945, when he was able to rejoin the Red Army and fight in the Battle of Berlin. The other perspective, interwoven with the chapters about Yefim’s captivity, tells his story from the 1950s to his death in the 2000s. Even with the chapters that show Yefim, alive and well, after the war, Yefim comes so close to death that, more than once, I wondered if the chapters of his later life were a kind of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” death vision. Pure, dumb luck saves Yefim as often as the kindness of German civilians.

Yefim’s later life is also a life of laying low and trying to hide from the authorities—the Soviets instead of the Nazis now. He avoids talking about how he spent the war, even though his children and others clamor for stories of heroism from the man who was in the army “from the invasion to Berlin.” Millions of Soviet soldiers, sailors, and pilots never made it back that, with the patriotic fervor surrounding the Soviet victories in World War II, there is a lot of clamoring. Yefim’s secrecy about the war (and his flirtations and his friendship with another, less lucky POW) taints his relationships with his wife and children. He can never drop his hypervigilance. He can never drop his fears of the Soviet government, even when attitudes towards POWs started to shift in the 1990s.

Your Presence is Mandatory is the kind of war story I seek out. It tells a story we rarely hear about. This isn’t a story of triumph or heroism. It’s a story of fear and trauma and hiding. It’s a story of being a prisoner, literally under the Nazis and figuratively under the Soviets. I realize that I’m making this novel sound grim—and there are some genuinely grim passages—but I found this book to be fascinatingly honest. Readers who enjoy novels set during and around the Second World War will like that this book offers something new. I also think that readers who like deep historical dives will be drawn into this novel.

This book was incredible! I have a feeling this book will have a lot of buzz. I'm so excited to see how this novel is received. It is a brilliant debut novel that I can't wait to talk about with other people.

Historical fiction has the power to make history come alive. Your Presence is Mandatory is an epic novel that sheds light on the different way USSR treated their own soldiers who were captured by the enemy and held as POWs. As we follow Yerim Shulman throughout his life, a different picture emerges of life before, during, and after WWII for a Jewish Ukrainian man and his family. It’s a life that’s hard to imagine amid the comforts of our 21st century homes with all our conveniences and privileges. For me, that’s just one of the reasons this book is a must read. It’s dark and sad, but it’s a window to the present in Ukraine.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the chance to read this arc in exchange for an honest review.

A powerful tale of a Red Army Jewish artillery man survives the war. A chronicle of the shame and guilt of German prisoners of war and the lie Schulman lives with throughout his life. Adventures and harshness is shared through alternating chapters from war days and after war days. A subject I don't know much about from this perspective, especially. The characters were many but distinct. and have a certain humanity that relates to today's war in Ukraine. Historical, yet timely. Overall a good and unique read for me.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Your Presence is Mandatory is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. It provides a unique perspective in a very crowded field of WWII stories in historical fiction. This journey is heart-breaking and thrilling in equal measure, due to both the war narrative and the later family dynamics that pepper the book as a counter-balance. The truly beautiful and impactful piece of this novel is that it is a soldiers story, a Jewish person's story, but it is also the story of his family around him, as history and decisions made reverberate throughout their lives.

I was so captivated by this novel and have no hardy critiques. The writing is lovely, but clear and straightforward. The flow is dynamic yet heartfelt enough to be savored. It felt particularly significant to receive anecdotal glimpses of the past connections and disconnections between Ukraine and Russia, particularly with what the World is watching today. I found the themes of guilt, betrayal, the pressure we put on ourselves, and put on us by others to be masterfully woven into this story. Your Presence is Mandatory will clench your stomach, break your heart, but it will also open your eyes. To me, those are the best kinds of stories.

This wasn't the lightest book in the world but it had interesting themes. It was like a war epic meets thriller as we follow him through this time period and trying to keep a secret. I was impressed at how many characters there were and how much time was covered but it was never confusing. The characters were all very distinct and memorable.

epic historical fiction, i found it very relevant to the stuff going on nowadays and very interesting studying our main char Yelim. thanks for the arc

Wow! A new favorite. I’m a sucker for WWII books and this is one of the best I’ve ever read. So much work went into this book & I hope that everyone has a chance to read it.

Your Presence is Mandatory was an emotional rollercoaster of a book. Things I loved about this book:
- It was real. The war-time experiences, the emotions, the familial relationships, the fear, regret and guilt.
- Yefim. He tries so hard to stay alive, to support his family, and to keep his secret. The shame that he experiences from holding this inside his entire life is overwhelming.
- Yefim and Ivan's friendship. How he cared for his friend as long as he could.
- The storyline moves, and there's never a dull moment.

I had no negatives to report about this book, but it was hard to read at a time like this with what is happening in the world.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for a chance to read this book.