Sasha Vasilyuk
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of debut novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY. She grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to San Francisco at the age of 13. She has a MA in Journalism from New York University and her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, TIME, the Telegraph, USA Today, and elsewhere.Besides writing, she has founded a leading wedding PR company, one of the first coworking spaces in the country, and the first U.S. magazine for Russian-speaking emigre teens. She also spent a year traveling alone around the world.
Your Presence Is Mandatory
Sasha Vasilyuk
A riveting debut novel, based on real events, about a Ukrainian World War II veteran with a secret that could land him in the Gulag, and his family who are forced to live in the shadow of all he has not told them.
Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.
In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family. Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren.
From Germany's prison camps and forced labor system to the Soviet culture of pride and paranoia, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.
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