(Fiction, 336 pp. 2024)
Winner of the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and a California Book Award, Vasilyuk’s debut novel explores the enduring costs of secrecy and deception in the Soviet era. It centers on the life of Yefim Shulman, a Jewish Ukrainian soldier in Stalin’s army. After the German army ambush his unit in 1941, Yefim must second-guess his faith in the Communist cause and “Mother Russia.” Throughout the war and its aftermath, life-or-death circumstances force Yefim to deny his identity as a Jew and as a former prisoner of war, but the consequences of these choices haunt him throughout his life. The novel depicts how half-truths and untold stories became essential to survival in the USSR, and continue echoing into the twenty-first century.
Discussion questions from Bloomsbury Publishing
Article by Andrew Silow-Carroll, on Vasilyuk receiving the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, August 24, 2025
Review by Nicole Yurcaba, World Literature Today, March 2024
Review by Svetlana Satchkova, Los Angeles Review of Books, April 24, 2024
Review by Hantian Zhang, The Masters Review, July 9, 2024
Review by Lorraine Berry, Alta, May 6, 2024
Review by Kevin Canfield, The San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2024
Presentation by the author at Globus Books in San Francisco (video: 1 hr. 58 min.)
Interview with Sasha Vasilyuk, Literary Hub, April 23, 2024
Interview with Sasha Vasilyuk, Chicago Review of Books, April 23, 2024
