YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY

A Ukrainian soldier survives World War II to face a lifetime of secrets.

When Yefim Shulman goes off to war, he imagines himself fighting for glory, honor, and other ideals. It’s 1941, and Yefim is a young Ukrainian artilleryman from a Jewish family stationed on the border between Germany and the Soviet Union. The realities of not only war, but of Stalinist politics—including Stalin’s hand in the famine Yefim’s family barely survived—soon come barreling toward Yefim not unlike cannon fire. Chapters set during the war alternate with chapters set much later; to begin with, Yefim, as an old man, has just died, and among his papers, his wife has found a letter to the KGB that seems to indicate that much of what he has told his family about his wartime experiences was untrue. Vasilyuk, a journalist as well as a debut novelist, sets out to comb through all this with patience, subtlety, and finesse, and she is occasionally successful. Various challenges get in her way, however. For one thing, she has an unfortunate penchant for describing warfare with cliches (“the bombs dropped with blood-chilling shrieks”) and a worse habit of describing Soviet or German characters by way of American idioms they never would have used themselves (“He must have been one lucky son of a gun”). Still, these are small complaints, easy to forgive. Less so are the way the action sags as the novel plods along and the way the characters never quite spring to life, no matter how many puppet-style strings Vasilyuk pulls.

Despite its subject matter, the novel lacks urgency and is overly reliant on other novels set in the Soviet period.