Your Presence Is Mandatory

Vasilyuk’s impressive debut chronicles the tribulations of a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran and his widow’s distress in the early stages of the 2014 Russo-Ukrainian War. Yefim Shulman, 18, is stationed in Lithuania with the Red Army in 1941 when he’s injured during a surprise nighttime attack. Later, he and his fellow survivors are ambushed and forced to work in a series of labor camps. After spending four years in captivity, he rejoins the Red Army in Niegripp and takes part in the invasion of Berlin. Back in Ukraine after the war, he marries bookish Nina. Looming over their life together is Stalin’s Order No. 270, which labels as a traitor anyone who fell captive to the Germans. Forced to lie for his survival, Yefim tells people he was never imprisoned. Throughout, Vasilyuk alternates the narration between Yefim, who dies in 2007, and Nina, who lives in Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2015. In a poignant moment, she reflects how, after surviving famine and WWII, she never thought she’d see the town she lived in for most of her life destroyed from within by separatists. This is a reverberating exploration of guilt, trauma, and the turbulent history between Ukraine and Russia. Agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary. (Apr.)