INTERVIEW: Sasha Vasilyuk by Anu Khosla
Your Presence Is Mandatory
Sasha Vasilyuk
Bloomsbury
Interview by
Anu Khosla
Before reading Sasha Vasilyuk’s first novel, I could’ve told you almost nothing about the role of the USSR in World War II. I could’ve told you that the Russians had fought on the side of the allies, but beyond that I couldn’t say much. It was only in the reading of her book that I realized the depths of my own ignorance. It was only in its reading that I realized how little I, as a result of the first ignorance, understand about today’s Russia, and the current war in Ukraine.
Your Presence is Mandatory is the story of Yefim, a Ukrainian Jew who went to fight for the USSR in Germany and somehow made it back alive. You’ll have to read the book to find out how he survived, and when you do find out, you’ll know much more than his family ever did. The story weaves in and out through Yefim’s travails in Germany, and shows, movingly, the impact all Yefim’s secrets would have on his family for generations to come.
On Super Tuesday 2024, amidst all the chaos, Sasha sat down with me to discuss her novel.
Anu Khosla: Yefim, your protagonist, feels very much like a cat with nine lives. Is the reason he is able to survive so much because he's lucky or because he's good at lying?
Sasha Vasilyuk: Maybe it's important to know that the character of Yefim is based on a real person, on my grandfather, and that he indeed survived all the things that are in the book. He even survived one more crazy thing that we decided to take out. There was a chapter where he, also true of my grandfather, was lost alone in Siberia and had to wander for multiple days, and somehow came out without a scratch. So I thought about this question of luck versus lying a lot. I think they're both part of the survival. And I think there's a third part where he has some sort of ability to navigate situations, often using humor or finding a way to use language to get what he wants. It's a mix of things, but I do think luck did play into it.
I did some research on what kind of people survived World War II versus not. There are some trends that have been documented. It's a mix of having hope but not too much hope. If you have too much hope, you're constantly disappointed. If you have no hope, you just die, basically. You can't sustain it. There is some spiritual sustenance that is needed. And so staying in the middle was the way people survived. The second aspect is having friends who support you, so I gave him a friend. That friend’s vaguely based on a person, but I know nothing about this person. I used the real name of somebody who was mentioned by my grandfather in the letter that I found on which this entire novel was based.
AK: There is a part where Yefim shares a bit more of his story with one member of the family. Was this story something that you knew or something that you discovered about your grandfather? How much of it was hidden from you versus something you had to research and find out?
SV: The novel is based on a two page letter that was my grandfather's confession to the KGB that my grandma discovered after he died. The opening chapter begins with the character of a widow, named Nina, who then finds this letter. It is pretty close to exactly what happened. I personally did not know about the letter for multiple months. Once my grandma and my aunt read this letter, it completely changed their understanding of who my grandpa was. And mind you, my grandparents were married for, like, over 50 years. It changed my aunt's understanding of her father.
Once you learn something new, you then replay the past, and all of a sudden, you reinterpret the past very differently. So this was happening, but they were both afraid and ashamed to share this information with anyone else. Even now my Aunt doesn’t feel comfortable talking about it to some of her friends. I think that's hard to understand for Americans, and this was one of my biggest challenges, explaining the culture of shame that surrounds certain fates that some people had during World War II.
Whether you were a prisoner of war, whether you were a forced laborer, or you just lived, let's say, in Ukraine, during the occupation of Ukraine, all of these things –– though none of them were your fault –– were then turned against you after the war ended. There's a lot of prejudice against all of these people. They numbered millions, and most of them never talked about it, hid it if they could, or just never discussed their past with their family. Once I learned about this letter and what was in it, I was interested in the story itself, how my grandfather, who was also a Jew, survived in Germany for four years. But maybe even more than that, not how he hid it, but what he felt hiding it. What possessed him to spend the rest of his life, 70 more years, 60 more years, hiding this from people who clearly loved him? I think that was the more interesting question to explore.
AK: I'm curious about the experience of navigating this with your family, given that they have some reservations about sharing this letter. How did you handle that?
SV: This book will not, at least for now, be published in Ukraine or in Russia for two different reasons. In Ukraine, it’s because they are only buying escapist fiction right now, and I can't blame them. In Russia, it’s because this book just can't exist there, it breaks too many laws.
The war today in Ukraine, it completely changed my understanding of World War II and Soviet culture, of the secrecy and silencing that my grandpa represents, and what role that played in the situation we have today. It’s important to tell stories that have been hidden away. Russia’s crazy ass president uses the past to tell his version of events and then uses that version of events to justify the war.
World War II is told in this way: it's a trauma, which is true. 27 million Soviet people were killed. And it's kind of a unifying trauma. So you can use this idea to unify everybody behind it. And also, because USSR won World War II but didn't really get that much credit from the rest of the world –– and the credit has diminished with the years –– there's a kind of resentment mixed with pride. It's like, “we won that war, and if you fuck with us again, we will win it again.” You take this macho feeling mixed with trauma and you can do a lot with it. And Putin is doing a lot with it, he's bringing the narrative of World War II to help convince his citizens to support this war. And many people don't know a lot of the gray area, don't know that Soviet Union was really terrible toward its own citizens, that it often punished innocent people who survived Nazi Germany and then went back home. Soviet powers often would take them and send them to the gulag, to their own camps, for multiple years. Or at the very least, would prevent them from getting good jobs, from going to university. There are so many punishments, and they had to carry this mark in their record for the rest of their lives and be too ashamed to talk about it. It was actually almost as bad as Nazi Germany was toward its own people. That changes your understanding of yourself, of your people and their capacity for evil, which now is surprising a lot of Russians. They think, oh, wait, we are now the fascists who are killing our neighbors.
AK: Within the American audience you're writing for, there are people that have Soviet backgrounds who are American, and then there are people, like me if I am honest, who are very uneducated about this history. And yet, right now, Russia and Ukraine are in the news in a big way. What are the considerations you had to take when you were writing this particular book for American audiences?
SV: This was a constant balancing act because I wanted this book to be accessible enough for people who don't know that much about that history, and yet be readable and interesting and new to people from that culture. Luckily, my writing group is full of American writers, and the questions they ask me along the way help me calibrate what they know and what they don't. You often assume when writing about your own culture that other people know more than they do. And so it was really helpful to have that check. I was almost more worried about the Soviet readers because it feels to me that this book is more entertainment for Americans, but it touches the hearts and minds of people there and could potentially change their view of their history. That's a lot to carry. It's a lot of weight. So just as with my writing group and with the American readers, I did have some beta readers who were from Soviet Union, but of different generations.
I began writing this book before the full scale invasion in the Russia-Ukraine War began. The earliest version of the conflict began in 2014, in the city where my family lived, where I spent every summer for my whole life. I visited in 2016, but didn’t begin writing the book until after that; partly because I never felt I could write about war. World War IIis just the most written about subject, and yet not often from the Soviet perspective. There's so much history there. There's so much pressure there. And I'm a girl. What am I doing writing about a male soldier in World War II? I was worried, because I’m trained as a journalist, that I wouldn’t be able to get it right. Not just the facts, which you can research, but what it feels like to be in a war.
When I went to the Donbas to visit my family in 2016, I saw and heard what war feels like. That gave me confidence to be able to transport my experience onto this much larger context. But interestingly, I was finishing a draft of this book, literally on the last chapter, which, as you know, does take place during the Russia Ukraine conflict, when Putin announced his full scale invasion.
AK: I read online that in addition to being a novelist you are also a travel journalist. I was curious about the way in which that background may have impacted the book at all. But I'm now wondering the opposite, did your grandparents experiences rub off on you to make you want to become a travel journalist?
SV: I mean, who doesn't want to become a travel journalist? Doesn’t that sound glamorous? But people who grew up in Soviet Union generally are pretty obsessed with traveling. It's partly because people weren't allowed to. I was very young when Soviet Union fell apart, so I didn't feel that I couldn't, but a lot of people do. It's also an economic status thing. For a lot of people, even when USSR fell apart and you lived in Ukraine or Russia, whatever, people were all poor, basically, and traveling was just not really an option. Interestingly, when the war in Ukraine began two years ago, one of the hardest things for Russians and one of the punishments that they got was their inability to travel as much.
AK: Tell me about the research process. It seems like there's probably two layers to this research, the historical research, but then also the personal family research. How did you learn about these things that happened to your grandfather?
SV: I think of this story as, I don't know, 5% based on reality, 95% fictionalized, because I had so little to go on. The first thing I did when I started researching was I emailed this very famous American professor, a Historian, who researched World War II and Ukraine. I told him I want to write a book, but here’s what I don't understand: how does a Jewish person captured in Germany survive? And he said, “I have no idea.” Well, that was helpful. So that was the question that was hardest to answer.
I luckily came across this research from at least two Soviet historians who are Jewish and who investigated exactly this, thank God. They interviewed other Jewish POWs and there were trends that I noticed that repeated from one person to another, one of which was they changed their name. Research like this helped explain the inexplicable parts of how my grandfather survived and how I'm here on this earth.
I had very minimal facts to go on. Sometimes it'd be like, “I remember it was very cold,” something like that. In a short letter, if somebody notes the cold, that means it was so cold that it was worth mentioning. It stuck in his memory 40 years later, so those details felt important to build off.
I hated research. Research was hard. But the harder part was the psychology of a young Soviet 19 or 18 year old soldier who was in that situation. What was he like before the war? What did all the things that happened during the war do to him? And then to also answer that same question of psychology for the next 60 years. In a way, I think basing fiction on a real person, a real story, makes the psychology harder. Because usually if you write fiction, you often start out with an arc, an emotional change. And here was the reverse process.
AK: Before reading your book, I had never heard of Ostarbeiters, that was just fascinating for me to learn about. Could you explain who those people were?
SV: Ostarbeiters translates from German as Eastern workers. While that sounds innocent, they were actually forced laborers who were caught on the streets of Ukraine, Belarus, other occupied regions, and deported on cattle trains to work in Germany, where they worked in different industries. Sometimes it was very related to the military directly, and sometimes it was farmland. All the able-bodied men were fighting, so there was a huge lack of labor in Germany. A lot of them were women. Some of them lived in labor camps and worked in factories or dug train tracks, like, really hard labor. Some of them worked in easier conditions, like in homes. As the war progressed, they got younger and younger. By 1944, most new workers were under 16 years old. Because a lot of them were young women, they were often raped. There were tens of thousands of pregnancies that occurred due to rape. Their conditions were often better than Soviet prisoners of war, who were sort of purposefully exterminated at the beginning of the war and then often used as forced laborers later.
When these Ostarbeiters came back home they were one of the groups that was very much mistreated and shunned by society and almost never talked about what happened to them there. And it has not been written about at all. Even in the current Soviet Union, this is not a very well known phenomenon.
AK: How did you first come across it?
SV: I also never knew this term, but when I saw it in my grandfather's letter, that's the first time I heard of this thing. My grandma knew about it, obviously, because she was there during World War II. She almost became one. She was called up to show up at the Ostarbeiter recruiting office, but luckily had a record from her mother who had just died who had tuberculosis. She showed this record, and if you had a condition, if you were sick, they were not going to send you to Germany. They were very much purists, clearly. And so she was able to escape.
AK: I’m wondering about the balance between conceiving of this work as an attempt at education, versus trying to work out your own family history.
SV: I think I was probably leaning more towards educating other people. I'm trying to think back. I felt like it's a good story. I felt that immediately when I heard about the letter. I just didn't have the confidence that I should be the one to tell a story. But it had all the right elements, like the span of it, the drama of it, the survival aspect of it, the fact that you think of someone as a hero, but it turns out they're a victim. I thought, this is a book that somebody should write, I just don't think it's me.
And then it took another ten years to write it, and it made me realize how little I knew of my own culture's history. It’s a weird thing to realize about yourself as an adult.
