BOOK NOOK: Discover some troubling truths in this historical novel about a Ukrainian peasant

A somewhat unknown aspect is the famine that took place in Ukraine during the early years of the Soviet Union. That dreadful famine was orchestrated to a large degree by the Soviet rulers in Moscow who exacted murderous confiscations of Ukrainian grain supplies. Millions perished.

In “Your Presence is Mandatory” our protagonist, Yefim Shulman, is a Ukrainian Jew and a miraculous survivor. He lived through the famine then as a soldier in the Soviet Red Army he survived WWII. The odds were against him. The story pivots back and forth between flashbacks to the war and Shulman’s ongoing challenges during the postwar years.

The alliance between Germany and the USSR had collapsed. In 1941 Shulman was an artilleryman stationed in Lithuania fighting the Germans when he was captured. He spent most of the rest of the war as a captive and as a slave laborer. As a POW he was terrified the Germans would find out he was Jewish.

He escapes the POW camp with his best friend, Ivan. They begin an arduous journey, traveling by night within Germany, in a futile attempt to make their way back to the Red Army. They get recaptured, Shulman conceals his true identity and soon becomes just another Ukrainian slave laborer in the Third Reich.

As he tries to blend in, the miracle of this Jewish man hiding out in the heart of Hitler’s Germany becomes a marvel. He even falls in love with a young German woman. His ingenuity and will to live are inspiring.

We keep pivoting from the war to the post-war period as Shulman attempts to conceal from the authorities the truth about his military service. The Soviets were incredibly paranoid after the war ended. POWs who managed to return to the USSR were considered traitors and spies, to be consigned to prison camps in the Soviet Far East.

Shulman eludes that fate by concealing the facts about where he spent the war. Then he gets married, has children, becomes a successful scientific researcher, while strenuously avoiding discussions of his military record. Meanwhile, during the Cold War, the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, kept striving to locate potential spies like Shulman.

One of the most powerful moments in the novel takes place when Shulman returns to his village in the Ukraine to try to locate his family. He had not comprehended yet the scope of the genocide the Nazis perpetrated upon the Jews of Ukraine. This is history we must never forget.

The author depicts Shulman’s agonizing efforts to simply live his life while concealing his truths. Her characters are exquisitely nuanced. Readers will learn a lot about Ukraine and the events that have brought us to where things are now.