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The Hand That Signed the Paper
1994 novel and literary hoax From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Hand that Signed the Paper is a 1994 novel and literary hoax. The novel was written by Helen Darville, now known as Helen Dale, and was published under the name Helen Demidenko. It tells 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. But it soon became the subject of a heated debate—first over accusations of anti-semitism, then with 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 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The unpublished manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper was the winner of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award and was published by Allen & Unwin in August 1994.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. But 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 postmodern fiction, while critics have contended that it is anti-semitic and that it distorts the history and moral lessons of the Holocaust.
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Plot summary
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Fiona Kovalenko, the daughter of an Irish mother and Ukrainian father, is a university student in Queensland, Australia. Her uncle Vitaly immigrated to Australia from Ukraine in 1948 and has recently 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.
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, 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 Adolf Hitler will help them to get revenge.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the village's residents begin to massacre communists. The German Army arrives in the village and is joyfully welcomed by its inhabitants. 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.
Vitaly is assigned to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he recalls bayonetting 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 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 and 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.
Evheny, serving with the 14th Waffen SS Galizien Division, surrenders to the British at Klagenfurt in 1945. He migrates 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 also dead and are preparing to move to Canada until 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 the ongoing war crimes trials, but her father is ultimately not 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.
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Themes
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Motives of Holocaust perpetrators
One of the primary themes of The Hand that Signed the Paper is the notion that Ukrainians participated in the Holocaust as retribution for hardships suffered at the hands of Jews under the Soviet Union.[1][2] The novel's narrator Fiona explains that the suffering of Ukrainians and the suffering of Jews were intimately tied together, saying that "the Ukrainian famine bled into the Holocaust and one fed the other".[3] In the pre-war years, Jews are shown to be responsible for many of the Kovalenko family's sufferings, including the deaths of Vitaly's father and infant brother.[4] After the German invasion, the novel's Ukrainian characters are shown to sign up to join the Nazis out of a desire for revenge.[2] In a review of the book published in Australian Book Review, Cathrine Harboe-Ree wrote that the novel could be understood to be arguing the case of the war crimes defendants, placing the reader in the role of the jury and making the case that Nazi collaborators were guilty of their crimes only due to the provocations that they had endured.[5] Commentary on the novel has also noted that the novel emphasises the humanity of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, shifting the reader's sympathy away from their Jewish victims, and consistently reminds the reader of the injustices committed against Ukrainians in the pre-war years by Jews and communists.[6][7][5]
Responsibility and forgiveness
The novel also explores the moral responsibility of Nazi collaborators and suggests a need to forgive rather than prosecute wartime atrocities.[8] On the book's back cover, it was described as "a book of extraordinary redemptive power".[9] Many commentaries on the novel highlight a scene in which Fiona's closest friend explains that she opposes efforts to try Nazi collaborators like Vitaly for war crimes, saying:[10][11]
I think it's wrong to try them. That trying people for what they did in a war legitimises other wartime activities that are left untried. War is a crime, of itself.
The novel also features the redemption or justification of several characters who participated in the Holocaust. A minor character and SS officer named Kretschmann becomes an anti-racist activist and joins the Peace Corps after the war, while the Treblinka guard Ivan the Terrible's brutality is explained to have been caused by the deaths of his family at the hands of Jews.[12][13] Vitaly explains to Fiona that until the war crimes prosecution he had stopped hating Jews, and that he is trying to feel sorry for what he did.[11] Critics of the novel argued that it uses anti-semitic tropes to imply that war criminals facing trial are the victims of vengeful Jews who are seeking to prosecute rather than forgive.[14][15] The academic Peter Christoff described the novel as an "exceptional feat of moral buck-passing" that presents Ukrainian collaborators as "passive, coerced innocents" who cannot fairly be held responsible for their actions.[16]
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Style
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The Hand that Signed the Paper is widely regarded as an example of postmodern literature. Analysis of the novel has noted the narrative's lack of explicit or implied authorial commentary, and its detached, emotionless recounting of events.[17][18][19] The philosopher Raimond Gaita argued that the novel exhibited no real narrative voice that could help readers to understand the horrors that it described.[20] The literary critic Andrew Riemer agreed, writing that the novel exemplified the "loss of faith in the authorial voice" and the "essential scepticism and tendency towards irony" that characterised late-20th century literature.[21] The author Ron Shapiro suggested that the novel embraces the amorality of postmodern literature by "allow[ing] itself to be read in whichever way one likes".[22][23] The literary academic Judith Ryan believed that the anachronisms of both Darville's novel and her public performance as Helen Demidenko revealed that she was attempting a pastiche or critique of postmodernism, concluding that it was a "thought-provoking yet ultimately confused attempt" at an exploration of postmodern literature.[24]
The significance of the authorial voice in The Hand that Signed the Paper has 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.[25] This was viewed by many readers as a technical flaw in the novel's construction.[26][27] The identity and significance of the third-person narrator—who does not meaningfully challenge the characters' sometimes distorted and anti-semitic accounts—is disputed. The literary academic Peter Kirkpatrick regarded the third-person voice as being that of Fiona, while the political scientist 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 Helen Demidenko herself.[28][29] The author Serge Liberman wrote that the lack of a clear authorial voice created a "near-schizoid dissociation" between Vitaly and Kateryna's recounting of the Holocaust's horrors and the narrator's lack of condemnation.[30] Sue Vice defended the novel in 2000 by arguing that it was an example of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of "polyphony", or a dialogue between voices in which the author or narrator of the novel does not have an omniscient perspective.[31] Vice concluded that the novel "testifies to the great power and potential of the polyphonic novel and dialogized heteroglossia" in writing about the Holocaust.[32] In 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 agenda and her tendency to "sexualise and glamorise" the Holocaust's perpetrators.[33]
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Background
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Author
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.[34] She attended Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale.[35] In 1989, Darville began her university studies at the University of Queensland, where she quickly developed a reputation as a fabulist.[36][37] She initially introduced herself as being of upper-class Belgian or Franco-Norman descent and claimed to be a graduate of one of Brisbane's most prestigious private schools. She also claimed to be a prodigious mathematician and the daughter of a Czech resistance fighter. Eventually, Darville settled on the story that she was the daughter of a working-class Irish mother and Ukrainian father.[38]
Around mid-1992 Darville began using the surname Demidenko-Darville, before switching to the surname Demidenko. At around the same time, she began working on the manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper.[39] The surname "Demidenko" was taken from the name of a Ukrainian participant in the massacre at Babi Yar featured in the book Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.[40][41] Her manuscript was initially written as a work of non-fiction, with its characters sharing her adopted surname Demidenko. An author's note claimed that the work had been written based on interviews with her supposed uncle Vitaly Demidenko.[42] Darville's boyfriend at the time, Paul Gadaloff, later claimed that Darville had become obsessed with ideas about Jews controlling society and with the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory.[43][44] He also claimed that Darville had described her book as a work of oral history, telling him that her uncle Vitaly now lived in Adelaide and that he had been a guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.[45] 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".[46]
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.[47][48] The legislation was controversial, with many fearing that the legislation would result in costly and socially divisive trials of elderly residents.[49] Three alleged war criminals, all Eastern European men in their seventies living in South Australia, were ultimately charged—Ivan Polyukhovich, Mikolay Berezowsky and Heinrich Wagner—of whom only the first would be brought to trial.[47][50] Polyukhovich was found not guilty on all charges.[50]
_-_SUPREME_COURT_JUSTICE_DOV_LEVIN_DISTRICT_AND_COURT_JUDGE_DALIA_DORNER_LOOKING_AT_A_PHOTO_ALBUM_DURING_THE_TRIAL_OF_JOHN_(IVAN)_DEMJANJUK.jpg)
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".[51] 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.[52] Her short story has been described as painting a sympathetic portrait of Demjanjuk as a victim of both Nazi Germany and the Israeli prosecution.[53] Some of Darville's acquaintances would later claim that she had been expelled from her university's branch of the Young Nationals after persistently sponsoring a motion opposing the Australian war crimes legislation.[54][55]
Manuscript development and Vogel Literary Award
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. The manuscript was rejected by editor Sue Abbey, who wrote that she was unimpressed by its flat characters and stilted dialogue.[42] 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.[56] According to Darville, she submitted her manuscript to the Vogel award on a whim after her brother pointed out the application form printed on a newspaper page that she had placed underneath her dogs' bowls. But Gadaloff later would contradict this account, saying that Darville had made "an assault on the Vogel from day one".[57]
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[58]
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.[59] 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".[58] McDonald later recalled 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.[60]
The book was announced as the winner of the 1993 Vogel award on 22 September. Following the announcement, Darville—still presenting 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.[61] She also told the media that she had been motivated to write her novel by the forthcoming war crimes trials.[62] 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".[42] 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".[63] She also removed references to tape-recorded conversations with her uncle.[42]
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 Vogel winners for several years. Dowrick refused to be associated with the work, later explaining that if it was not the Vogel winner she would have rejected it outright. According to Dowrick, Darville became angry at her refusal and eventually said, "the Jews are not going to get away with this one".[64][65] 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".[66][65]
Following Castro's refusal, the manuscript was sent to Lynne Segal, who also declined to edit it.[67][65] She explained privately, "By the first ten manuscript pages I started getting an inkling of what this was about. After 30 pages I decided that I could only copy edit it and let it damn itself. After 50 pages I decided to no longer work on it, and wrote a report for the publisher stating my reasons."[68] After receiving a 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".[69] 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.[70] Jukes made some minor factual corrections, but concluded that the novel was largely historically accurate. This, for the publisher, adequately allayed Segal's concerns.[71][72][73]
The manuscript was then assigned to Neil Thomas.[74] 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".[75][72] But he was satisfied by Jukes' report and agreed to edit it.[76] During the editing process Darville was reluctant to make changes and expressed frustration to her acquaintances about the way the publisher was treating her.[77] Darville falsely claimed to a friend that Segal and Dowrick had both been fired by Allen & Unwin after refusing to edit her manuscript.[78] But despite this acrimonious relationship, the novel was ultimately published in August 1994 with only minor changes from the Vogel-winning manuscript.[79] Its back cover featured praise from the journalist David Marr and from Jill Kitson, Darville's champion on the Vogel judging panel.[80]
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Reception
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Initial reviews
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".[81]
But despite these fears, the initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive.[80] In a review in The Canberra Times, Peter Pierce described the novel as "one of the most distinguished winners" of the Vogel award.[82] In The Courier-Mail, Frank O'Shea called the novel a "fascinating and courageous piece of imaginative writing".[80] 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".[83]
Reviewers reserved particular praise for the book's detached, unemotional tone.[84] Reviewing the book in The Age, Andrew Riemer praised the author's "precise, dispassionate prose" and wrote that Darville's aim of showing how ordinary people could commit horrific acts was both entirely legitimate and carried out with great skill.[85] 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.[86]
The early reviews were not without some suggestions of 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".[5] 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 for collaborating with the Nazis.[87] Riemer, despite giving an otherwise positive assessment, noted that the novel's failure to explicitly condemn its characters would likely disturb some readers.[85] But these concerns were at first relatively muted.[88] Darville received a mostly positive feature in The Australian Jewish News following the book's release, which concluded that her intentions in writing the novel were honourable.[89][88]
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 folk dance at one event.[90][91] In a speech at the Sydney Writers' Festival on 23 January 1995, Darville 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.[92] Darville claimed that her Ukrainian father Markov Demidenko was a taxi driver while her Irish mother was a domestic worker.[93] 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.[94]
Miles Franklin Award
In 1995, The Hand that Signed the Paper was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, widely regarded as Australia's most prestigious literary award.[15][95][96] The judging panel included Jill Kitson—who had championed the novel on the Vogel judging panel and whose praise appeared on its back cover[97]—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.[98] 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.[99] On 1 June, The Hand that Signed the Paper was announced as the winning novel.[100] 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".[95]
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.[101] The novel was 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.[102] 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.[103][104] Manne ultimately concluded in his 1996 book on the Demidenko saga that very little was known about the reasons for the Miles Franklin judging panel's decision.[105]
Darville's Miles Franklin win attracted her a wave of media attention.[100] Darville expanded on her motivations for writing the novel in an interview with ABC Radio, explaining:[106]
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.[107]
Accusations of anti-semitism
The eventual firestorm over Darville's novel was sparked on 9 June 1995 by the publication of a column in The Age by Pamela Bone.[108] The column provided a scathing assessment of the novel; Bone criticised the claim that it was "a book of extraordinary redemptive power", questioning the morality of attempting to redeem the Holocaust's perpetrators. She also criticised the novel for presenting a false historical narrative by blaming Jewish involvement in the Ukrainian famine for Ukrainian anti-semitism. Bone concluded, "If Helen Demidenko condemns the anti-Semitism of her characters, I wish she had said so more clearly".[9]
On 17 June, Judith Armstrong, a professor of Russian Studies at the University of Melbourne, responded with a column defending the novel.[109] Others quickly joined the debate in The Age.[110] The historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote in a column on 21 June that the work contained serious historical errors and criticised Armstrong for using literary theory to validate the novel's anti-semitism.[111] Jacques Adler, a historian and former member of the French resistance whose family had been killed at Auschwitz, wrote on 22 June that the work was "so far from the historical truth that the book serves as an apologia for genocide".[112]
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 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".[113][114] Darville, falsely claiming to be a lawyer,[115] explained that it was her legal training and courtroom experience that had compelled her to "search for a motive" for Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.[114] Darville's defence of her novel appeared alongside another critique from the author and political commentator Gerard Henderson that labelled the novel a "loathsome" book and criticised Darville's conflation of Bolsheviks and Jews as ahistorical.[116] That evening, Darville debated Henderson on ABC television.[117] An article published that day noted that the growing controversy appeared to be having a positive effect on sales; Allen & Unwin had ordered two reprints, and there were over 3000 back orders.[118] 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.[119]
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".[120] Dershowitz argued that Darville's goal had been to use the novel in furtherance of her opposition to the war crimes trials to justify Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust and ensure that war criminals would remain unpunished.[121] The anti-semitism scholar Robert S. Wistrich described the novel's thesis as "more dangerous than any form of Holocaust revisionism".[122]
While criticism of the novel continued to mount, others defended the novel and cast its critics as censorious. An editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald criticised proponents of "PC fiction".[123] David Marr defended the novel, comparing the "terrible smears and vilification" against the book to the Satanic Verses controversy.[124] 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".[125] The critic Morag Fraser argued that the novel was not without its flaws, but that it deserved a more serious and tolerant debate.[126] Others blamed the Jewish community for the backlash;[127] conservative columnist Frank Devine described the criticism as an organised campaign by Jewish organisations, comparing it to the radical feminist campaign against The First Stone.[128]
Darville's identity revealed
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.[129][130] Bentley had become suspicious after noticing that Darville had a tendency to provide vague answers when asked about her education. He was informed of her true identity by her high school principal Robin Kleinschmidt.[129] Bentley was awarded the 1995 Gold Walkley for the story.[131]
At first, many of Darville's defenders refused to believe Bentley's claims. But on 21 August, members of Darville's family publicly confirmed the story.[132] Her brother told the media that her claims of Ukrainian ancestry had been "a great marketing exercise".[133] Darville released a statement claiming that she had begun to use the name "Demidenko-Darville" at university and that Demidenko was the name of her paternal extended family.[132] 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.[134] On 25 August, a statement with the headline "Helen Darville Apologises" was published nationwide. 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".[134]
Following the revelation, criticism mounted towards those who had defended her novel. The literary academic Ivor Indyk insisted that Darville's ALS Gold Medal should be revoked, while Helen Daniel, the editor of Australian Book Review, and Louise Adler, the arts editor of The Age, argued that the judging panel that had awarded Darville the Miles Franklin Award should resign.[135] The author Guy Rundle wrote in The Age that the saga was "perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times".[136] 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.[137][136][138] The historian William Rubinstein wrote that Darville had falsified her identity in order to give support 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".[139]
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.[140][141][142] Gerard Henderson argued in The Sydney Morning Herald that Darville had received a positive reception because she claimed that her book was drawn from oral history, and that without that excuse, its similarities to anti-semitic propaganda became apparent.[115] Pamela Bone wrote that she felt some sympathy for Darville, 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 nation's best novel of the year.[143]
Others continued to defend Darville. Frank Devine wrote that the criticism amounted to "miserable, philistine treatment of a young writer of talent".[144] 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".[144] David Marr described the revelation of Darville's identity as "deeply sad" but said that it did not impact the quality of the novel itself.[145] 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".[146]
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.[147][96] It topped all but one of the Weekend Australian's biweekly bestseller lists between 1 July and 7 October.[148] Allen & Unwin announced that it would re-issue the novel under the name Helen Darville and that it had sold the rights to an unnamed American publisher.[149]
Plagiarism accusations
On 26 August, it was reported in the Herald Sun that Darville had plagiarised a passage from the novel The Power and the Glory.[150] 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.[151] The night before, Allen & Unwin had halted distribution over the book over the plagiarism concerns.[152] Additional examples of plagiarism in The Hand that Signed the Paper would continue to be reported over the next month.[153]
On 7 September, Darville's lawyers at MinterEllison announced that they believed the plagiarism allegations to be false. The lawyers said that they had consulted an expert on postmodern literature, who had told them that Darville's appropriations from various other sources was a normal element of postmodern writing. The lawyers for Allen & Unwin concurred.[154][155] On 8 September, Allen & Unwin announced that they were "satisfied that allegations of plagiarism cannot be justified" and the novel was returned to distribution.[156] Eventually Allen & Unwin released a new edition of the book under the name Helen Darville, with the sources copied by Darville now acknowledged and the praise from David Marr and Jill Kitson removed from the book's back cover.[148]
Commentators were divided on 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.[157] 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.[154] The literary academic Judith Ryan described Darville's copying as "flagrant", but noted that it did not constitute plagiarism in a legal sense.[158]
Later reception
While the novel had somewhat faded from the media spotlight by 1996, the debate continued in academic and literary publications.[159] By February 1996, three books on the saga had been released: an anthology of newspaper articles and television and radio transcripts called 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 under the title The Demidenko Debate.[160] In June, Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust was published.[161]
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".[162] Manne argued that no "civilised" European publisher or literary judging panel would have even considered the novel, and that the saga demonstrated the Australian literary establishment's "provincial liberal naivety, historical ignorance and sentimental multiculturalism".[163] Riemer gave a more sympathetic assessment of the novel in The Demidenko Debate. Riemer 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.[164] 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".[165] Riemer defended the novel as a work of fiction, and wrote that critics' lack of understanding of the genre led to "many passionate but often ill-founded expressions of outrage".[166]
Riemer and other defenders of the novel argued that much of the fervour surrounding the novel was driven by the Jewish community. Riemer noted that the controversy was strongest in Melbourne, where the Jewish community is more conservative and Orthodox than in Sydney.[167][168] In January 1996, a cartoon published in The Australian had shown Darville impaled on a hanukkiah.[169][170] Darville herself attributed criticism of her novel to the "Jewish lobby".[171] Others, however, argued forcefully against this claim. Manne noted that the Australian Jewish press was not particularly critical of the novel until after the backlash had already erupted in mainstream newspapers, and that Jewish organisations had played a minimal role in the controversy.[172] The 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.[173] 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.[174][175][176]
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Analysis
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Perspective
The novel and its reception have been widely analysed as a case study in the history of Australian multiculturalism. The literary scholar Sneja Gunew argued that the episode shows that "multicultural" authors are often read simplistically and are valued largely for their "authenticity".[177][178] Zora Simic argued that by presenting herself as Demidenko, Darville inadvertently "enacted her own critique" of the "ethnic essentialism" of Australian literature.[179] Jane Hyde echoed this sentiment, arguing it was unsurprising that a young person growing up in an environment where multiculturalism was increasingly central to Australian culture would begin presenting herself as Irish–Ukrainian.[180] The Holocaust scholar Avril Alba has suggested that the novel's reception also revealed the "shaky foundations" of Australian multiculturalism, 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.[181]
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" unsuitable for publication.[182] 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.[183] 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.[184][185] 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".[186]
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