Author Talk: Your Presence is Mandatory with Author Sasha Vasilyuk

Spanning between World War II and the Russia-Ukraine conflict and based on real events, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) is a riveting debut novel about a Ukrainian Jewish WWII veteran with a lifelong secret, the repercussions for his family, and the grace they find in the course of their survival. Your Presence Is Mandatory is the winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. The novel is translated into seven languages.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury), winner of the California Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, which was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It has been translated into Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Finnish, and Hebrew. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MA in journalism from New York University. She has written for the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, CNN, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Telegraph, KQED, Narrative, and elsewhere. Before becoming an author, she cofounded the first coworking space in San Francisco, started a wedding PR agency, and traveled alone around the world. Sasha is the recipient of a Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, a North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) Award, and a Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Fellowship from UC Berkeley. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.www.sashavasilyuk.com.

Our facilitator, Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic, Jewish and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. With Harriet Murav, he translated, from Yiddish, David Bergelson's Judgment: A Novel (2017) and, from Yiddish and Russian, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (2026). He is the author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made (2022). For over a decade, he has also been on the faculty of the Great Jewish Books program at the Yiddish Book Center; he has also written cultural criticism for a number of outlets, including Jewish Currents, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Republic.

Register to join us online on December 15 at 7:00 p.m. ET. Purchase the book online. Please contact cajl@tisrael.org with questions.