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This article is about the 1994 Australian novel. For the poem by the same name, see Dylan Thomas.
The Hand that Signed the Paper
Book cover displaying a field of wheat with a red overlay. The top half of the cover displays the title The Hand that Signed the Paper, while the bottom half displays the name Helen Demidenko.
AuthorHelen Demidenko
LanguageEnglish
GenreFiction
PublisherAllen & Unwin
Publication date
1994
Publication placeAustralia
Media typePrint
Pages157
ISBN1863736549
OCLC1510153690

The Hand that Signed the Paper is a 1994 novel that has been described as one of Australia's most famous literary hoaxes. The novel was written by Helen Darville, now Helen Dale, and was published under the name Helen Demidenko. It recounts the story of a Ukrainian family that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The novel initially received positive reviews and was the 1995 winner of Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. But it soon became the subject of a lengthy and heated debate—first over accusations of anti-semitism, followed by the revelation that Darville had falsified her identity and ethnicity to suggest that the novel was based on her own family history.

The novel is narrated by Fiona Kovalenko, a university student of Irish–Ukrainian descent living in Queensland, Australia. Fiona's uncle Vitaly has been charged with crimes against humanity for his service as a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp. The novel recounts Vitaly and his siblings' 1930s upbringing in Ukraine amid the famine known as the Holodomor and other atrocities committed by the Soviet Union, positing that Jewish involvement in Bolshevism was the motive for Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust. The novel's author Helen Darville, a student at the University of Queensland and the daughter of middle-class English parents, presented herself as a working-class Irish–Ukrainian woman named Helen Demidenko between around the time she began writing the novel in 1992 and her eventual exposure in 1995. During this period, she misrepresented the novel as being drawn from her own family's wartime experiences.

The unpublished manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper was the winner of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in August 1994. The novel received a positive reception upon its release and was the winner of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award and ALS Gold Medal. However, the novel soon became the subject of controversy over accusations that it was overly sympathetic towards the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The backlash intensified in August 1995 when it was revealed that "Helen Demidenko" was a fabrication and that Darville had no familial connection to Ukraine.

The novel and the resultant controversy have been the subject of multiple books, including Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate and Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting. Defenders of the novel have argued that it is a valid work of fiction, while critics have contended that it is anti-semitic and that it distorts the history and moral lessons of the Holocaust.

Plot summary

[edit]

Fiona Kovalenko is a university student in Queensland, Australia and the daughter of an Irish mother and Ukrainian father. Her uncle Vitaly, who immigrated to Australia from Ukraine in 1948, has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Holocaust. Fiona fears that her father Evheny may also be charged. Fiona describes finding photos in her father's bedside table at the age of 12 showing her father and uncle in SS uniforms participating in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar and guarding prisoners at the Treblinka extermination camp.

Two people walk down a road while two corpses lie on the footpath behind them. In the background a fence and trees can be seen.
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1933

Kateryna, Fiona's aunt and the sister of Vitaly and Evheny, begins describing her upbringing in a village near Khmel'nik, Ukraine. She recounts the 1930s famine known as the Holodomor and the repression that Ukraine suffered under the Soviet Union. During the famine the kommisar's wife, a Jewish doctor named Judit, refuses to treat Kateryna's youngest brother and likens Ukrainians to dogs. The famine eventually takes the lives of Kateryna's brother and all 12 of her cousins. Kateryna and Evheny are sent to a Komsomol school to be indoctrinated, although Evheny quickly runs away. At the school Kateryna blames the famine on "communists and Jews" and is told by her fellow Ukrainian students that Hitler will help them to get revenge.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the village's residents begin to massacre those who they believe to be communists. The German Army arrives in the village and is joyfully welcomed by its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Kateryna and her fellow students are evacuated to Kiev as German troops surround the city. On the journey she develops a connection with a German SS captain named Wilhelm Hasse, with whom she enters into a relationship. Vitaly and Evheny join many of the other young men from their village in signing up to join the SS as auxiliary volunteers. In Kiev, Kateryna watches from a window as two uniformed men rape and kill a Jewish woman. She recognises one of the men as Evheny and waves to him. The next day, the Jews of Kiev are marched to the Babi Yar ravine and massacred using machine guns.

Two uniformed men holding rifles standing in front of a doorway amid rubble and debris. Inside the doorway are multiple bodies.
Ukrainian members of the SS standing in front of Jewish corpses in the Warsaw Ghetto

Vitaly is assigned to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he bayonets a Jewish baby hidden in a knapsack before shooting its father. After a month, he is reassigned to Treblinka. He is tasked with burning the corpses of those who have been killed in the gas chambers and participates in the looting of victims' belongings. He describes throwing infants into the air so that another guard, known as Ivan the Terrible, could catch them on a bayonet. Another guard explains to Vitaly that Ivan is particularly brutal towards the prisoners because during the famine Jews burned down his house with his parents and six siblings trapped inside. Vitaly begins a relationship with a Polish girl named Magda, with whom he has a son named Ihor. Eventually, following a prisoner revolt, the Treblinka camp is shut down and its guards are reassigned elsewhere. Vitaly is sent to the front, leaving Magda and Ihor behind in Poland.

Ehveny, serving with the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division, surrenders to the British at Klagenfurt in 1945. He is allowed to migrate to Britain with Kateryna, whose husband Hasse was killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. They learn that their mother was killed in an industrial accident while working as a forced labourer in Germany. They assume that Vitaly is dead and are preparing to move to Canada when they learn in 1949 that he has migrated to Australia and is working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Evheny, his Irish fiancée Margaret, Kateryna, and Kateryna's two children all move to Australia to join him.

In the present day, as Fiona works to help Vitaly prepare for his trial, he dies in hospital from a stroke. Fiona continues to protest against the ongoing war crimes trials, but her father is ultimately never charged. Fiona visits Treblinka where she meets a man whose Quaker aunt was killed at the camp. He asks her whether she is sorry for what her uncle did, and she says that she is.

Background

[edit]

Author

[edit]

Helen Darville, the author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, grew up in Queensland, Australia as the daughter of two middle-class English migrants, Harry and Grace Darville.[1] She attended Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale.[2] In 1989, Darville began her university studies at the University of Queensland, where she quickly developed a reputation as a fabulist.[3][4] She initially introduced herself as being of aristocratic Belgian or Franco-Norman descent and claimed to be a graduate of a prestigious private school. She also made claims of being an accomplished mathematician and the daughter of a Czech freedom fighter. Eventually, Darville settled on the story that she was the daughter of a working-class Irish mother and Ukrainian father.[5]

Around mid-1992, Darville began using the surname Demidenko-Darville to match her claims of Irish–Ukrainian ancestry, before switching to the surname Demidenko. At around the same time, she began working on the manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper.[6][7] Her manuscript was initially written as a work of non-fiction and featured characters who shared her adopted surname Demidenko. An author's note attached to the manuscript claimed that the work had been written based on taped interviews with her supposed uncle Vitaly Demidenko.[8] Darville's boyfriend at the time, Paul Gadaloff, later claimed that Darville had become obsessed with the idea that Jews controlled parts of society and with the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory.[9][10] He also claimed that Darville had described her book as an oral history of her own family, telling him that her uncle Vitaly had been a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp and that he still lived in Adelaide.[11] A friend of Darville's at the time, Natalie Jane Prior, later wrote that Darville had a tendency during this period to use "ugly, offensive and tiresome" language about "hook-nosed Jews and looney Zionists".[12]

Darville's manuscript was written amidst a nationwide debate over the trials of Nazi war criminals in South Australia. In 1988, the Australian government had passed the War Crimes Amendment Act to allow for the prosecution of the estimated 4000–5000 war criminals who had immigrated to Australia following the Second World War.[13][14] The legislation was highly controversial, with many fearing that the legislation would result in costly and divisive trials of elderly residents.[15] In the end, three alleged war criminals, all Eastern European men in their seventies living in South Australia, were charged—Ivan Polyukhovich, Mikolay Berezowsky and Heinrich Wagner—of whom only the first would ultimately be brought to trial.[13][16] Polyukhovich was found not guilty on all charges.[16]

A black and white photo showing two men at a podium handling photographs of military-looking men
Judges reviewing evidence during John Demjanjuk's 1986 war crimes trial in Israel

Darville was a strong opponent of the trials, later explaining, "I was very upset by the war crimes trials because I thought they were very specifically directed at the Ukrainian community and were very vindictive and sanctimonious...it wasn't motivated by a sense of justice but by a sense of revenge".[17] In 1988, Darville had written a short story in her high school magazine from the perspective of John Demjanjuk, who was believed at the time to be the Treblinka guard known as "Ivan the Terrible", during his war crimes trial in Israel.[18] Her short story has been described as painting a sympathetic portrait of Demjanjuk as a victim of both Nazi Germany and the Israeli prosecution.[19] Some of Darville's acquaintances would go on to claim that she had been expelled from her university's branch of the Young Nationals after persistently sponsoring a motion opposing the war crimes legislation.[20][21]

Manuscript development and Vogel Literary Award

[edit]

In early 1993, Darville submitted her manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper as a non-fiction work to the University of Queensland Press. Darville claimed in an author's note attached to the manuscript that the work was based on interviews that she had conducted with her uncle. The manuscript was rejected by editor Sue Abbey, who wrote that she was unimpressed by its flat characters and wooden dialogue.[8]

Later that year, Darville submitted the manuscript under the name Helen Demidenko to the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, an award for an unpublished manuscript by an author aged under 35. The winning manuscript is awarded a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin.[22] According to Darville, she submitted her manuscript to the Vogel award on a whim after her brother pointed out the application form on a newspaper page underneath her dogs' bowls. But Gadaloff later would contradict this account, saying that Darville had made "an assault on the Vogel from day one".[23]

Bizarre, lurching, erratic in focus, and also I think naive in believing that the great horror of the Holocaust can be understood in this way.

I feel ill at what this manuscript tells me and ill that it leaves things out. But I agree that it impresses like nothing else in the entries this year.

It needs a brilliant edit to deepen the implications and tease others out. The early parts are a narrative history while later it tries to behave like a novel. It needs more writing to frame these brutal Ukrainians more clearly.

What's touching is the way this young author assumes the momentous matters she writes about can be held in the frame of a fictive family history.

Maybe she's right. But there will have to be a lot more work on the roots of Ukrainian antisemitism otherwise this manuscript will be seen with justification as antisemitic. If it's a winner I can't see a dinner as an appropriate way of handling the award. Nothing joyous to celebrate here.

—Roger McDonald, in a report sent to his fellow judges of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award[24]

The judges of the 1993 Vogel award were the novelist Roger McDonald, the fiction writer Jennifer Rowe, and the broadcaster Jill Kitson. McDonald and Rowe did not initially see a clear favourite among the roughly sixty entries they had been sent, while Kitson quickly became a strong advocate for The Hand that Signed the Paper.[25] Rowe was comfortable with the selection, while McDonald was more sceptical of Darville's manuscript. He sent a short report to his fellow judges expressing his reservations, including his concern that the manuscript would "be seen with justification as antisemitic".[24] McDonald later recalled that he had tried to make the case that the manuscript was both morally numb and potentially anti-semitic, but that these concerns had been brushed aside by Kitson and by Patrick Gallagher, the publisher at Allen & Unwin. Eventually McDonald acceded to the decision to award the Vogel to Darville.[26]

The book was announced as the winner of the 1993 Vogel award on 22 September. Following the announcement, Darville—still presenting herself as Helen Demidenko—repeatedly told the media that her father had been born in Ukraine and that he had emigrated to Australia in the 1950s.[27] She also told the media that she had been motivated to write her novel by the forthcoming war crimes trials.[28] Representatives of her publisher, believing that the manuscript was at least in part autobiographical, were concerned that the book might put Darville's purported uncle in danger of prosecution for war crimes and encouraged her to change her characters' names from "Demidenko" to "Kovalenko".[8] Darville began to describe the novel as "part fact, part fiction" and claimed that it was based "on stories and situations she had heard about from family and friends while growing up".[29] She also removed references to tape-recorded conversations with her uncle.[8]

Having been awarded the right to a publishing contract, the manuscript was sent to Allen & Unwin to be edited for publication. The manuscript was first assigned to Stephanie Dowrick, who had edited the winners of the Vogel award for several years. Dowrick did not want to be associated with the work, later explaining that if it was not the Vogel winner she would have rejected it outright, and ultimately declined to edit it. According to Dowrick, Darville became angry at her refusal and eventually said, "the Jews are not going to get away with this one".[30][31] The manuscript was then sent to Brian Castro, who also declined to edit it and wrote back, "I have no idea how this MS could have won...I'm afraid I couldn't even finish reading it; not because of the propaganda and jingoism which abounds, and which is sometimes indistinguishable from the author's viewpoint; but because the prose is deadening and numbing".[32][31]

Following Castro's refusal, the manuscript was sent to Lynne Segal, who also declined to edit it.[33][31] After receiving a brief three-page report on the manuscript from Segal, Dowrick asked her to write a longer report detailing her concerns. Segal explained in her report, "I now believe that the entire premise of this manuscript is based on an historical inaccuracy, i.e. the Jews being responsible for the horrific famine of the 1930s".[34] After reading this report, Gallagher commissioned a retired historian from the Australian National University, Geoffrey Jukes, to write his own report on the manuscript's historicity.[35] Jukes made some minor corrections and criticisms, but concluded that the novel was broadly historically accurate. This, for the publisher, adequately allayed the concerns that Segal had raised.[36][37][38]

The manuscript was then assigned to Neil Thomas.[39] Thomas later expressed that he had held some doubts about the novel's quality and had felt that it "teeters on the edge of apologetics".[40][37] But he was satisfied by Jukes' report that the manuscript's historical interpretation was plausible and agreed to edit it.[41] During the editing process Darville was highly reluctant to make changes and expressed frustration to her acquaintances about the way the publisher was treating her.[42] Darville falsely claimed to a friend that Segal and Dowrick had both been fired by Allen & Unwin after refusing to edit her manuscript.[43] But despite this acrimonious relationship, the novel was ultimately published in August 1994 with only minor changes from the Vogel-winning manuscript.[44] Its back cover featured praise from the journalist David Marr and from Jill Kitson, Darville's champion on the Vogel judging panel.[45]

Reception

[edit]

Initial reviews

[edit]

Ahead of the publication of The Hand that Signed the Paper, Darville and her publisher were both bracing for the potential that the novel would spark backlash. They feared that the book would attract furore both from members of the Ukrainian community angered by the portrayal of their countrymen as war criminals, and from those in the Jewish community who would accuse the novel of providing a sympathetic portrayal of the Holocaust's perpetrators. Darville said in an August 1994 interview, "There's potential for a shitcan to be tipped over me with this book".[46]

But despite these fears, the book's initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive.[45] In a review in The Canberra Times, Peter Pierce described the novel as "one of the most distinguished winners" of the Vogel award.[47] In The Courier-Mail, Frank O'Shea called the novel a "fascinating and courageous piece of imaginative writing".[45] The novel was named one of the best books of 1994 by Margaret Jones in The Sydney Morning Herald, where she wrote that it was "an astonishing first novel by a writer in her early 20s".[48]

Reviewers reserved particular praise for the book's detached, unemotional language.[49] Reviewing the book in The Age, Andrew Riemer praised the author's "precise, dispassionate prose" and wrote that Darville's aim of helping the reader to understand how ordinary people could commit horrific acts was both entirely legitimate and carried out with great skill.[50] In The Sydney Morning Herald, Miriam Cosic praised the author's "unflinching prose" and the novel's numb aesthetic, describing the novel as a "dense, horrifying" work.[51]

The early reviews were not without some suggestions that the novel might contain anti-semitic undertones. In a review published in Australian Book Review, Cathrine Harboe-Ree praised the work as a "fine novel", but wrote that it contained a "rather superficial view of Jews".[52] In The Sun-Herald, Susan Geason wrote a more sceptical review, praising the novel as an impressive debut while criticising the author's failure to properly explain her characters' motivations.[53] Riemer, while giving an otherwise positive assessment of the novel, noted that it would likely trouble some readers due to its failure to explicitly condemn its characters.[50] But these concerns regarding anti-semitism were at first relatively muted.[54] Darville received a mostly positive feature in The Australian Jewish News following the book's release, which concluded that her intentions were honourable.[55][54]

Following the novel's publication, Darville—still living under the name Helen Demidenko—continued to present herself as being of Ukrainian descent. Darville wore Ukrainian clothing in many of her public appearances, signed books in Ukrainian, and performed a Ukrainian dance at one event.[56][57] In a speech at the Sydney Writers' Festival on 23 January 1995, Darville provided a detailed account of her fictional upbringing. She told the audience that she had grown up in commission housing and had won a scholarship to a private school, where she had graduated as dux.[58] Darville claimed that her Ukrainian father Markov Demidenko was a taxi driver while her Irish mother was a domestic worker.[59] In one interview Darville claimed that winning the Vogel award had allowed her father to take his first plane trip, and that it had been the first book her mother had ever read after leaving school at the age of 12.[60]

Miles Franklin Award

[edit]

In 1995, The Hand that Signed the Paper was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, widely regarded as Australia's most prestigious literary award.[61][62][63] The judging panel included Jill Kitson—who had championed the novel on the Vogel judging panel and whose praise appeared on its back cover[64]—alongside Chancellor of the University of Sydney Dame Leonie Kramer, head of the State Library of New South Wales Alison Crook, and English professors Harry Heseltine and Adrian Mitchell.[65] The panel shortlisted four works: A Mortality Tale by Jay Verney, Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan, Dark Places by Kate Grenville, and The Hand that Signed the Paper.[66] On 1 June, The Hand that Signed the Paper was announced as the winning novel.[67] In their report, the judging panel wrote that the novel "brings to light a hitherto unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience" and displays "a powerful literary imagination coupled to a strong sense of history".[61]

The literary critic Andrew Riemer later wrote that the announcement that the novel had won the Miles Franklin Award was met with "a mixture of disbelief and sardonic amusement" in literary circles.[68] In his view, the novel was generally regarded as an "immature though compelling first novel" that was deserving of the Vogel award—a prize designated for emerging writers—but not the Miles Franklin.[69] While some speculated that the judging panel's decision was attributable to a growing fetishisation of "multicultural chic" in Australian literature, both Riemer and the political scientist Robert Manne were sceptical of this hypothesis, noting that the judging panel featured several members known for their literary conservatism.[70][71] Manne ultimately concluded in his 1996 book on the Demidenko saga that next to nothing was known about the reasons for the Miles Franklin judging panel's decision.[72]

Darville's Miles Franklin win attracted her a wave of media attention.[67] Darville expanded on her motivations for writing the novel in an interview with ABC Radio, explaining:[73]

A lot of [Ukrainians], but not all of them unfortunately, will admit that Ukrainians did dreadful things to the Jews and to communists when the Nazis were there. But they get very upset that no one knows what happened to them in the 1930s which was just as bad. And that's why I worked very hard to give a complete picture of a historical event, and not to take the Holocaust out of the context of European history, and so to make my readers appreciate that it's a facet, and probably a fairly inevitable facet of European history at that time.

While the decision would not be announced until July, by which time the novel was already embroiled in controversy, The Hand that Signed the Paper had also been selected on 17 April as the winner of the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.[74]

Accusations of anti-semitism

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The eventual firestorm over Darville's novel was sparked on 9 June 1995 with the publication of a column in The Age by Pamela Bone.[75] The column provided a scathing assessment of the novel; Bone criticised the claim that it was "a book of extraordinary redemptive power", questioning the redemption of "men who bayoneted Jewish babies and machine-gunned hundreds of innocent people". She also criticised the novel for presenting a false historical narrative, arguing that it was ahistorical to blame Jewish involvement in the famine for Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis. Bone also questioned whether it was the book's narrator or its author expressing anti-semitic sentiments, writing, "If Helen Demidenko condemns the anti-Semitism of her characters, I wish she had said so more clearly".[76]

On 17 June, Judith Armstrong, a professor of Russian Studies at the University of Melbourne, responded with a column in The Age defending the novel and claiming that it derived from a Russian literary tradition of showing the moral confusion of foot soldiers during war.[77][78] Others quickly joined the debate in The Age.[79] The historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote in a column on 21 June that the work contained serious historical distortions and criticised Armstrong for lending academic credibility to the novel's anti-semitic prejudices.[80] Jacques Adler, a historian and former member of the French resistance whose family had been killed at Birkenau, wrote on 22 June that the work was "so far from the historical truth that the book serves as an apologia for genocide".[81]

On 27 June, Darville wrote in both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald to defend her book, claiming that the criticism "bordered on the hysterical". She defended her historical interpretation and highlighted her supposed direct knowledge of this history, claiming that most of her father's family had been "killed by Jewish Communist Party officials in Vynnytsa".[82][83] Darville, falsely claiming to be a lawyer,[84] explained that it was her legal training and courtroom experience that had compelled her to seek the truth and "search for a motive" for Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.[83] Darville's defence of her novel appeared in the pages of The Age alongside a critique by author and political commentator Gerard Henderson. Henderson called the novel a "loathsome" book and criticised Darville's conflation of Bolsheviks and Jews as ahistorical.[85] That evening, Darville debated Henderson on ABC television.[86] An article published that day noted that the growing controversy appeared to be having a positive effect on sales; Allen & Unwin had already ordered two reprints, and there were over 3000 back orders.[87] By 11 July, it was reported that the novel had sold more than 10,000 copies and was ninth on the Angus & Robertson bestseller list.[88]

On 29 June, the Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz published an op-ed in both The Age and the Australian Financial Review calling the novel "pernicious" and "mean-spirited".[89] Dershowitz claimed that the novel sought to explain and perhaps even justify Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.[90] He argued that Darville's goal had been to use the novel in furtherance of her opposition to the war crimes trials in order to ensure that Nazi war criminals would go unpunished.[90] The anti-semitism scholar Robert S. Wistrich described the novel's thesis as "more dangerous than any form of Holocaust revisionism".[91]

While criticism of the novel continued to mount, others defended the novel and cast its critics as politically correct and censorious. An editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald criticised proponents of "PC fiction".[92] David Marr defended the novel, comparing the backlash against The Hand that Signed the Paper to the Satanic Verses controversy, and issued a plea for patience amid "terrible smears and vilification".[93] The author and literary critic Gerard Windsor wrote in Australian Book Review that the criticism was a "well-funded witch hunt" filled with "righteous high-mindedness and tribal indignation".[94] The critic Morag Fraser acknowledged that the novel was flawed, but argued that it was far from a work of propaganda and that it deserved a more serious and open-minded debate.[95] Others blamed the Jewish community for the backlash;[96] conservative columnist Frank Devine described criticism of Darville's book as an organised campaign by Jewish organisations, comparing it to the radical feminist campaign against the book The First Stone.[97]

Darville's identity revealed

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On 19 August 1995, the journalist David Bentley revealed in The Courier Mail that Helen Demidenko was actually Helen Darville, the daughter of English migrants, and had no Ukrainian ancestry.[98][99] Bentley had become suspicious after noticing Darville's vagueness about where she had been educated and was informed of her true identity after approaching her high school principal Robin Kleinschmidt. Kleinschmidt had until that point kept Darville's identity to himself, and had instead sent her a legal letter in April of that year after she had made a number of false statements in the media about her time at the school.[100] Bentley's story in The Courier Mail would go on to win him the 1995 Gold Walkley.[101]

At first, many of Darville's defenders refused to believe Bentley's story. But on 21 August, members of Darville's family publicly confirmed its veracity.[102] Her brother told the media that her Ukrainian ancestry had been "a great marketing exercise".[103] Darville released a statement that day claiming that she had begun to use the name "Demidenko-Darville" at university and that Demidenko was a family name on her father's side.[102] It was soon reported that Darville had also pretended to be French and Czech while at university, and that she had committed plagiarism in her university's student newspaper in 1990.[104] On 25 August, a statement with the headline "Helen Darville Apologises" was published in newspapers across Australia. Darville admitted that her Demidenko identity was a fabrication and wrote "I am truly sorry if my book or my actions have been perceived in any way as antisemitic or degrading to the Ukrainian community...I condemn without reservation the perpetrators of the Holocaust".[104]

Following the revelation, criticism mounted towards those who had defended her novel. The literary academic Ivor Indyk demanded that Darville be stripped of the ALS Gold Medal, while Helen Daniel, editor of Australian Book Review, and Louise Adler, arts editor of The Age, called for the Miles Franklin judges to resign.[105] The author Guy Rundle wrote in The Age that the saga was "perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times".[106] Much of this criticism was directed towards Jill Kitson, who had served on both the Vogel and Miles Franklin judging panels and had been one of the novel's most committed defenders.[107][106][108] The historian William Rubinstein wrote that Darville had undertaken her charade in order to lend credence to "an antisemitic lie of the most despicable kind", and argued that the fact that the "ignoramuses" on the judging panel had held onto their positions was a "sad indictment of Australia's utter provinciality and marginality".[109]

Critics argued that Darville's claims of Ukrainian ancestry had been used to lend credibility to her work. Darville had strongly implied, although she had never explicitly claimed in public, that the work was autobiographical.[110][111][112] Gerard Henderson argued in The Sydney Morning Herald that Darville had been listened to because she claimed to be reporting oral history, and that without that excuse, the novel seemed more like an echoing of anti-semitic propaganda.[84] Pamela Bone wrote that she felt some sympathy for Darville despite the harm that her novel had caused, and that most of the blame for the saga should fall on the Miles Franklin judges. Bone expressed her astonishment that the judges had found "a catalogue of atrocities interspersed with some laughably stilted dialogue and some clumsy sex scenes" the best novel that Australia had to offer.[113]

Others continued to defend Darville. Frank Devine wrote that the criticism amounted to "miserable, philistine treatment of a young writer of talent".[114] Leonie Kramer, who had served on the Miles Franklin judging panel, wrote that she was puzzled by the "sustained and vitriolic attack on the book and its author", and claimed that the episode "calls into question our claims to be a tolerant and fairminded society".[114] David Marr described the revelation of Darville's identity as "deeply sad" but said that it did not in any way detract from the quality of her work.[115] The philosopher Peter Singer defended the novel, writing that it was not an anti-semitic work and attributing the controversy to the media's tendency to treat everything as a "kind of sporting contest" rather than engaging in mature intellectual debate.[116]

The new wave of controversy only added to the novel's sales; by 23 August, it was reported that the novel had sold about 25,000 copies.[117][62] It topped all but one of the Weekend Australian's biweekly bestseller lists between 1 July and 7 October.[118] Allen & Unwin re-issued the novel under the name Helen Darville and sold the rights to an undisclosed American publisher.[119]

Plagiarism accusations

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On 26 August, it was reported in the Herald Sun that Darville may have plagiarised a passage from the novel The Power and the Glory.[120] On 31 August, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Darville had plagiarised additional passages from Thomas Keneally's novel Gossip from the Forest, Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover, and a Ukrainian collection called The Black Deeds of the Kremlin.[121] The night before, Allen & Unwin had frozen distribution over the book over the plagiarism concerns.[122] Additional examples of plagiarism in The Hand that Signed the Paper would continue to be reported throughout September.[123]

On 7 September, Darville's lawyers at MinterEllison announced that they believed the plagiarism allegations to be false. The lawyers had consulted an expert on postmodern literature, who had told them that the type of borrowing from sources that Darville had undertaken was normal for the genre. The lawyers for Allen & Unwin concurred.[124][125] On 8 September, supply of the novel was restored after Allen & Unwin announced that they were "satisfied that allegations of plagiarism cannot be justified".[126] Eventually Allen & Unwin would release a new edition of the book under the name Helen Darville, with the sources copied by Darville now acknowledged and the original praise from David Marr and Jill Kitson removed from the book's back cover.[118]

Commentators were divided on the question of whether the novel contained plagiarism. Ivor Indyk said that the plagiarism "attacks the very foundations of the book", while the author Thomas Shapcott said that what had occurred was appropriation rather than plagiarism.[127] Robert Manne described it as "concealed, pervasive and clumsy plagiarism", although acknowledging that it did not rise to the level of a breach of copyright law.[124] The literary academic Judith Ryan described Darville's copying as "flagrant", but noted that it did not constitute plagiarism in a legal sense.[56]

Later reception

[edit]
A man in a suit sitting in front of a bookshelf
Robert Manne, who emerged as one of the novel's most vocal critics

While the novel had somewhat faded from the media spotlight by 1996, the debate continued in academic and literary publications.[128] By February 1996, three books on the saga had been released: an anthology of newspaper articles and television and radio transcripts under the title The Demidenko File; a tell-all book by Darville's friend Natalie Jane Prior named The Demidenko Diary; and a book by the literary critic and author Andrew Riemer, also published by Allen & Unwin, under the title The Demidenko Debate.[129] In June, a fourth book was added with the publication of Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust.[130] The novel would eventually come to be labelled one of Australia's most notorious literary hoaxes.[131]

Manne was highly critical of the novel, writing, "I found the book laughably inadequate to its subject and unmistakably antisemitic...I found it morally and historically shallow, coarse and cold, even technically quite incompetent".[132] Manne argued that no "civilised" European publisher or literary judging panel would have considered touching the novel, and that the saga demonstrated the Australian literary establishment's naivety and historical ignorance.[133] He concluded that while the book did not deny the historical reality of the Holocaust, it denied its "ultimate inexplicability" by casting it as an ordinary episode in a long history of reciprocal clashes between Ukrainians and Jews, concluding that the novel was a work "not of historical but of cultural or moral revisionism".[134]

Riemer gave a more sympathetic assessment of the novel in The Demidenko Debate. Riemer, a secular Jew who had lost much of his own family in the Holocaust,[135] admitted that he was troubled by parts of the novel's subtext, but that upon his initial reading he had kept reminding himself that its author must have inherited some of her Ukrainian family's prejudices.[136] He described his view of the novel at the time as being that it was "anti-Semitic in a limited and on the whole tolerable sense".[137] Riemer defended the novel as a work of fiction, and wrote that the blurring between fiction and discursive writing led to "many passionate but often ill-founded expressions of outrage".[138]

Riemer also argued that much of the fervour surrounding the novel was driven by the Jewish community, noting that the controversy was strongest in Melbourne, where the Jewish community is more conservative and tight-knit than in Sydney.[139][140] Riemer was far from the only observer to argue that the campaign against The Hand that Signed the Paper had been driven by Jews; in January 1996, a cartoon published in The Australian had shown Darville impaled on a hanukkiah.[141][142] Darville herself had attributed criticism of her novel to the "Jewish lobby".[143] Others, however, argued forcefully against this claim. Manne noted that the Australian Jewish press took a generally favourable attitude towards the novel until the controversy erupted in mainstream newspapers and that the Jewish community's political leadership had played a minimal role in the saga.[144] Journalist Michael Gawenda concurred, pointing out that many of the book's fiercest critics were not Jewish, while some of the book's strongest defenders, including Andrew Riemer and Peter Singer, were.[145] Critics also contested Riemer's suggestion that Darville's opponents had attempted to censor her, insisting that there was no evidence that meaningful threats of legal action against the book were ever made.[146][147][148]

Much of the commentary on the novel situated it in the context of literary postmodernism, with many of the novel's critics arguing that it demonstrated the shortcomings of the movement.[149][150][151][152] The philosopher Raimond Gaita wrote that novel showed that postmodernism's strong scepticism of truth and objectivity can lead to the compromise of moral and spiritual values.[153] Gaita argued that "there are many speakers in the novel, but in an important sense there are no voices".[154] Ron Shapiro suggested that the novel embraces postmodernism in that it "allows itself to be read in whichever way one likes" and exploits the "structural amorality" of postmodern literature.[155][156] Judith Ryan believed that the inconsistencies and anachronisms of Darville's novel and public persona revealed that she was attempting a pastiche or critique of postmodernism, but concluded that it was a "thought-provoking yet ultimately confused attempt" at an exploration of postmodern literature.[157] Some defenders of the novel, drawing on Roland Barthes' notion of the "the death of the author", argued that the novel should be interpreted solely as a work of fiction independent of its author's identity or extra-textual utterances.[138][158] Others criticised this approach, arguing that Darville's public performance as Demidenko was intrinsic to understanding the text.[159][160][161]

The authorial voice of The Hand that Signed the Paper has also been widely debated. Sue Vice, a scholar of Holocaust fiction, has written that the novel is constructed "idiosyncratically" through a combination of first-person accounts from Fiona, Kateryna and Vitaly, as well as an implied third-person narration.[162] This was viewed by some early readers as a technical flaw in the novel's construction.[163] Peter Kirkpatrick regarded the third-person voice as being that of Fiona, while Robert Manne wrote that the third-person narrator knew things that Fiona could not have known, and that the only plausible explanation was that it was the voice of the author herself.[164][165] The author Serge Liberman wrote that the lack of a clear authorial voice in the novel created a "near-schizoid dissociation" between Vitaly and Kateryna's horrifying stories and the narrator's lack of condemnation or reaction.[166] Sue Vice defended the novel in 2000 by arguing that it was an example of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "polyphony"—a dialogue between voices in which the author or narrator of the novel does not have an omniscient perspective.[167] Vice concluded that the novel "testifies to the great power and potential of the polyphonic novel and dialogized heteroglossia" in writing about the Holocaust.[168] By 2007, however, Vice wrote that she no longer believed that the novel exhibited genuine polyphony, and that its apparent multivocality instead disguised the author's "undemocratic agenda" and her tendency to sexualise and glamorise the Holocaust's perpetrators.[169]

Analysis

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The novel and its reception have been widely analysed as a case study in explorations of Australian multiculturalism. The literary scholar Sneja Gunew has argued that the episode shows that "multicultural" authors are often read simplistically and are valued largely for their "authenticity" and for their ability to create a "cheap cultural tourism event".[170][171] Zora Simic argued that by presenting herself as Demidenko, Darville inadvertently "enacted her own critique of multiculturalism"; specifically a critique of the "ethnic essentialism" of Australian literature.[172] Jane Hyde echoed this sentiment, arguing it was unsurprising that a young person growing up in an environment where multiculturalism was becoming "holy writ" would see reinventing herself as Irish–Ukrainian as the path to success.[173] The Holocaust scholar Avril Alba has suggested that the novel's reception also revealed the "shaky foundations" of Australian multiculturalism in the 1990s, reflecting the tension between those who believed that it was important to reconcile past injustices, and those who believed that reconciliation itself posed a threat to multiculturalism.[174] Gunew lamented that the Demidenko hoax had led other ethnic writers and texts to be treated with derision and suspicion in Australian literature in its aftermath.[175][176]

Many critics of the novel argued that its success demonstrated a concerning lack of historical literacy in Australia regarding the Holocaust. Peter Christoff wrote that European publishers would have immediately recognised the novel as a "shallow, immature and ultimately anti-Semitic novel" unworthy of publication.[177] Robert Manne concurred, arguing that the novel revived the Nazi myth of Jewish Bolshevism and European publishers would have rightly rejected it. He argued that Australia's positive reception of the novel demonstrated its collective historical amnesia regarding the Holocaust.[178] The education policy researcher Susan Moore suggested that the novel also demonstrated the deteriorating quality of humanities education in Australia.[179] More recent scholarship has noted that while applying the techniques of postmodern literature to the Holocaust was once seen as fundamentally inappropriate, The Hand that Signed the Paper was part of a wider trend of increasingly adventurous literary works about the Holocaust, including those that provide a more sympathetic portrayal of its perpetrators.[180][181] Thomas Shapcott had regarded this as an ominous trend, calling The Hand that Signed the Paper the first cultural expression of "a new generation which is distant from the horrors of the Holocaust, who see it as something they want to question, or to challenge, or to set aside".[182]

See also

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References

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Citations

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  1. ^ Manne 1996, p. 4.
  2. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 5–6.
  3. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 13–15.
  4. ^ Roberts & Makler 1995.
  5. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 15–16.
  6. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 17, 20.
  7. ^ Ryan 2003, p. 175.
  8. ^ a b c d Knox 2005.
  9. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 20–22.
  10. ^ Koutsoukis 1995.
  11. ^ Manne 1996, p. 23.
  12. ^ Manne 1996, p. 20.
  13. ^ a b Alba 2019, p. 285.
  14. ^ Gunew 1996a, p. 3.
  15. ^ Laster 1995, p. 627.
  16. ^ a b Laster 1995, p. 628.
  17. ^ Alba 2019, p. 286.
  18. ^ Manne 1996, p. 9.
  19. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 10–11.
  20. ^ Manne 1996, p. 14.
  21. ^ Smith 2019, p. 65.
  22. ^ Manne 1996, p. 25.
  23. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 25–26.
  24. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 32.
  25. ^ Manne 1996, p. 31.
  26. ^ Manne 1996, p. 33.
  27. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 21.
  28. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 22.
  29. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 23.
  30. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 34–36.
  31. ^ a b c Riemer 1996, p. 114.
  32. ^ Manne 1996, p. 37.
  33. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 37–38.
  34. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 38–39.
  35. ^ Manne 1996, p. 40.
  36. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 40–41.
  37. ^ a b Alba 2019, p. 277.
  38. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 69.
  39. ^ Manne 1996, p. 43.
  40. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 43–44.
  41. ^ Manne 1996, p. 44.
  42. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 45–46.
  43. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 46–47.
  44. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 46–48.
  45. ^ a b c Manne 1996, p. 49.
  46. ^ Manne 1996, p. 48.
  47. ^ Pierce 1994.
  48. ^ Sydney Morning Herald 1994.
  49. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 50–51.
  50. ^ a b Riemer 1994.
  51. ^ Cosic 1994.
  52. ^ Harboe-Ree 1994.
  53. ^ Geason 1994.
  54. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 179.
  55. ^ Alhadeff 1994.
  56. ^ a b Ryan 2003, p. 170.
  57. ^ Gunew 1996a, p. 6.
  58. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 58–60.
  59. ^ Morley 2007, p. 75.
  60. ^ Loane 1995.
  61. ^ a b Bennie 1995.
  62. ^ a b Shenon 1995.
  63. ^ Christoff 1995, p. 47.
  64. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 32, 49.
  65. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 135–136.
  66. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 136–137.
  67. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 65.
  68. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 135.
  69. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 138–139.
  70. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 141–142.
  71. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 63–64.
  72. ^ Manne 1996, p. 64.
  73. ^ Manne 1996, p. 161.
  74. ^ Manne 1996, p. 62.
  75. ^ Manne 1996, p. 71.
  76. ^ Bone 1995a.
  77. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 72–73.
  78. ^ Armstrong 1995.
  79. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 74–75.
  80. ^ Wheatcroft 1995.
  81. ^ Adler 1995.
  82. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 76–77.
  83. ^ a b Demidenko 1995.
  84. ^ a b Henderson 1995b.
  85. ^ Henderson 1995a.
  86. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 78–79.
  87. ^ Buchanan 1995a.
  88. ^ Voumard 1995.
  89. ^ Manne 1996, p. 79.
  90. ^ a b Dershowitz 1995.
  91. ^ Mendes 1996, p. 55.
  92. ^ Sydney Morning Herald 1995.
  93. ^ Marr 1995.
  94. ^ Windsor 1995.
  95. ^ Fraser 1995, p. 429.
  96. ^ Neumann 1995, p. 55.
  97. ^ Manne 1996, p. 90.
  98. ^ Manne 1996, p. 93.
  99. ^ Alba 2019, p. 275.
  100. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 6, 93.
  101. ^ Canberra Times 1995.
  102. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 94.
  103. ^ Freeman 1995.
  104. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 95.
  105. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 100–101.
  106. ^ a b Rundle 1995.
  107. ^ Manne 1996, p. 99.
  108. ^ Mitchell 1996, p. 111.
  109. ^ Manne 1996, p. 102.
  110. ^ Courtney 2019, p. 82.
  111. ^ O'Connell 1996, p. 42.
  112. ^ Meyer 2004, pp. 40–41.
  113. ^ Bone 1996.
  114. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 104.
  115. ^ Freeman & Buchanan 1995.
  116. ^ Singer 1995.
  117. ^ Roberts 1995.
  118. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 112.
  119. ^ Buchanan 1995b.
  120. ^ Manne 1996, p. 107.
  121. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 107–108.
  122. ^ Jopson 1995b.
  123. ^ Manne 1996, p. 108.
  124. ^ a b Manne 1996, p. 110.
  125. ^ Gibson 1995.
  126. ^ Jopson 1995a.
  127. ^ Jopson & Freeman 1995.
  128. ^ Shapiro 1996b, p. 104.
  129. ^ Rutherford 1996.
  130. ^ Greenwood 1996.
  131. ^ Smith 2019, p. 63.
  132. ^ Manne 1996, p. 1.
  133. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 188–190.
  134. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 133–134.
  135. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 130–131.
  136. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 110.
  137. ^ Riemer 1996, p. 111.
  138. ^ a b Riemer 1996, p. 63.
  139. ^ Riemer 1996, pp. 232–233.
  140. ^ Manne 1996, p. 178.
  141. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 176–177.
  142. ^ Vice 2000, pp. 140–141.
  143. ^ Bone 1995b.
  144. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 179–180.
  145. ^ Gawenda 1995.
  146. ^ Manne 1996, p. 168.
  147. ^ Alba 2019, p. 283.
  148. ^ Schaffer 1995, p. 176.
  149. ^ Neumann 1995, p. 54.
  150. ^ Morley 2007, p. 84.
  151. ^ Smith 2019, p. 69.
  152. ^ Shapiro 1996a, p. 47.
  153. ^ Gaita 1995a, p. 15.
  154. ^ Gaita 1995b, p. 33.
  155. ^ Shapiro 1996b, p. 106.
  156. ^ Shapiro 1996b, p. 113.
  157. ^ Ryan 2003, p. 183.
  158. ^ Morley 2007, pp. 81–82.
  159. ^ Shapiro 1996b, pp. 114–115.
  160. ^ Courtney 2019, p. 84.
  161. ^ Morley 2007, p. 79.
  162. ^ Vice 2000, p. 149.
  163. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 39, 44.
  164. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 125–129, 182.
  165. ^ Kirkpatrick 1995, pp. 158–260.
  166. ^ Liberman 1995, pp. 168–169.
  167. ^ Vice 2000, pp. 149–150.
  168. ^ Vice 2000, p. 159.
  169. ^ Vice 2007, pp. 178–180.
  170. ^ Gunew 1996b, pp. 57–59.
  171. ^ Gunew 1996a, p. 8.
  172. ^ Simic 2007, pp. 39–40.
  173. ^ Hyde 1995, p. 49.
  174. ^ Alba 2019, p. 273.
  175. ^ Gunew 1996b, p. 60.
  176. ^ Gunew 1996a, p. 9.
  177. ^ Christoff 1995, p. 48.
  178. ^ Manne 1996, pp. 187–188.
  179. ^ Moore 1995, p. 10.
  180. ^ Morgan 2020, p. 8.
  181. ^ Shields 2016, pp. 66–67.
  182. ^ Manne 1996, p. 133.

Sources

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Books and book chapters

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Journal articles

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Magazine articles

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Newspaper articles

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