Draft:The Hand that Signed the Paper

The Hand that Signed the Paper

Language	English
Genre	Fiction
Publisher	Allen & Unwin
Publication date	1994
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print
Pages	157
ISBN	1863736549

The Hand that Signed the Paper is a 1994 Australian novel about a Ukrainian family that collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. The novel was written by Helen Darville, now known as Helen Dale, under the name Helen Demidenko. The novel initially received positive reviews and was the 1995 winner of Australia's most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Award. But soon after winning the award, the novel sparked a heated controversy; first involving accusations that the work was anti-semitic, followed by the revelation that Helen Darville had falsified her identity and ethnicity to falsely imply that the novel was based on her family history.

Helen Darville, the daughter of two middle-class migrants from the north of England, adopted the identity "Helen Demidenko" and began to present herself as being from a working-class Irish-Ukrainian background while a student at the University of Queensland in 1992. She soon began writing the manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper. The earliest versions of the manuscript were written as a work of non-fiction, featuring characters who shared her adopted surname "Demidenko" and an author's note claiming that the work had been written based on tape-recorded conversations with her uncle. The unpublished manuscript was the winner of the 1993 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. The novel was published by Allen & Unwin in August 1994 to positive reviews, and would go on to win the 1995 Miles Franklin Award and the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

In June 1995, a scathing column in The Age described the novel as anti-semitic and ahistorical, and questioned the merits of attempting to redeem the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The column sparked a lengthy debate over anti-semitism, literary freedom, and censorship, with prominent critics of the novel including Alan Dershowitz, Gerard Henderson, Louise Adler, Robert Manne and Raymond Gaita, and defenders including Peter Singer, Leonie Kramer, Andrew Riemer, Jill Kitson and David Marr. In August, it was revealed that Darville had falsified her name and backstory, falsely implying that the novel was based on a family history, and had no familial connections to Ukraine.

The novel became a bestseller during the controversy and has been described as Australia's most famous literary hoax. The saga has been the subject of multiple books, including Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust and Andrew Riemer's The Demidenko Debate. The novel and the resultant controversy continues to be widely discussed by scholars of literary post-modernism and Australian multiculturalism.

Plot summary

Fiona Kovalenko is a university student in Queensland, Australia, the daughter of an Irish mother and Ukrainian father. Her uncle Vitaly, who immigrated to Australia from Ukraine in 1948, 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 soon 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 machine gunning 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 childhood in a village near Khmel'nik, Ukraine. She recounts the 1930s famine known as the Holodomor, during which her youngest brother and all 12 of her cousins died. During the famine the kommisar's wife, a Jewish doctor named Judit, refuses to treat her brother, saying that she is "a physician, not a veterinarian". A letter from Judit to her mother expresses her hatred and contempt for Ukrainians, who she describes as "stupid, idolatrous peasants". Kateryna and Evheny are sent to a Komsomol school to be indoctrinated, although Evheny soon runs away, while Vitaly is left behind. 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 are believed to be communists. The German Army soon arrives in the village and is joyfully welcomed by its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Kateryna and her fellows students are evacuated as refugees to Kiev as German troops surround the city. On the journey she develops a connection with a German SS captain named Wilhelm Hasse. They soon enter into a relationship and begin to live together in Hasse's apartment in Kiev.

Vitaly and Evheny join many other young men from their village in signing up to join the SS as auxiliary volunteers. They are taken to Khmel'nik, where Vitaly is assigned to serve in Poland and Evheny is assigned to serve in Kiev. In Kiev, Kateryna watches from a window as two uniformed men rape and kill a Jewish woman before loading her body onto a lorry. 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, where Evheny helps to massacre them using machine guns. Kateryna threatens to report a man from her village whom she saw helping to save some of the Jews, telling him that they are worthless communists.

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 assigned to help burn 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 later explains to Vitaly that Ivan the Terrible is particularly brutal towards the prisoners because during the famine Jews burned down his house with his parents and six siblings trapped inside. Vitaly soon 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 Ukrainian 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 as a labourer with Kateryna, whose husband Wilhelm Hasse had been killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. They learn that their mother had been 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 Queensland, Australia to join him.

In the present day, as Fiona works to help Vitaly prepare for his trial, she finds out that he has suffered a stroke. He later dies in hospital. 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.

History

Helen Darville, the author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, grew up in Queensland, Australia as the daughter of two middle-class British migrants, Harry and Grace Darville. She attended Rochedale Redeemer Lutheran College, where she was a keen public speaker and excelled in creative writing.

In 1989 Darville began her university studies at the University of Queensland. Darville quickly developed a reputation as a fabulist. 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 at various points of being an accomplished mathematician and the daughter of a Czech freedom fighter, and at one point told another student that her mother was going to win a Nobel Prize for inventing a new type of potting mix. Eventually, however, Darville settled on the story that she was the daughter of a working-class Irish mother and Ukrainian father.

Around mid-1992, Darville began using the surname Demidenko-Darville to match her claimed Irish-Ukrainian ancestry, before eventually switching to the surname Demidenko. At around the same time, she began working on the manuscript for The Hand that Signed the Paper. Her manuscript was initially written as a work of non-fiction, with its characters sharing 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. Darville's boyfriend at the time, Paul Gadaloff, later claimed that around this time Darville had become obsessed with the idea that Jews controlled various parts of society and with the Jewish Bolshevism conspiracy theory. 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 Treblinka and that he still lived in Adelaide. 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".

Darville's manuscript was written amidst a heated controversy 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. The legislation was highly controversial, with many fearing that prosecutions would prove divisive and that the legislation would result in costly and futile trials of elderly residents. 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. Polyukhovich was found not guilty on all charges.

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." In 1988 Darville had written a short story in her high school magazine from the perspective of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was believed at the time to be the Treblinka guard known as "Ivan the Terrible", during his war crimes trial in Israel. Her short story, "Demjanjuk versus the State of Israel", was later described by Robert Manne as painting a fundamentally sympathetic portrait of Demjanjuk as a victim of both Nazi Germany and the Israeli state. According to Manne, 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.

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 in a report that she was unimpressed by the manuscript's flat characters and wooden dialogue.

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 the guarantee of a publishing contract with Allen & Unwin. 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. However, Gadaloff later contradicted this account, saying that Darville had made "an assault on the Vogel from day one".

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

The judges of the 1993 Vogel award were Roger McDonald, Jennifer Rowe and 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. According to McDonald, Kitson told Patrick Gallagher, the publisher at Allen & Unwin, that she favoured Darville's novel. Gallagher then conveyed this to McDonald and Rowe. Rowe was comfortable with the selection, while McDonald was less enthusiastic about Darville's manuscript. He sent a short report to his fellow judges expressing his reservations, including his concern that without additional work the manuscript "will be seen with justification as antisemitic". McDonald later recalled that he had tried to make the case at a meeting with his fellow judges that the manuscript was both morally numb and potentially antisemitic, but that these concerns had been brushed aside by Kitson and Gallagher. Eventually McDonald acceded to the decision to award the Vogel to Darville.

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. She also told the media that she had been motivated to write her novel by the forthcoming war crimes trials. Representatives of her publisher, believing that the work was at least in part autobiographical, were concerned that the book might put Darville's purported uncle in danger of prosecution and encouraged her to change her characters' names from "Demidenko" to "Kovalenko". 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". She also removed references to tape-recorded conversations with her uncle.

Having been awarded the right to a publishing contract, the manuscript was sent to Allen & Unwin to be edited in preparation for publication. The manuscript was first assigned to Stephanie Dowrick, a fiction publisher at Allen & Unwin 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 unquestionably rejected it outright, and ultimately declined to edit it. According to Dowrick, Darville became angry at Dowrick's refusal to edit the manuscript and eventually said, "the Jews are not going to get away with this one". 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". Following Castro's refusal, the manuscript was sent to Lynne Segal. While Segal, a Jewish woman, was initially keen to edit the manuscript, she eventually declined. She wrote in a letter three months later, "By the first ten manuscript pages I started getting an inkling of what this is 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".

After receiving Segal's three-page report on the manuscript, Dowrick requested that she write a longer report for the publisher detailing her concerns. Segal explained in a report to the publisher, "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". After receiving this report from Segal, Gallagher commissioned a retired historian from the Australian National University, Geoffrey Jukes, to write his own report on the manuscript's historicity. Jukes made some minor historical corrections, but did not make major criticisms of Darville's interpretation of the historical record. This, for Gallagher, sufficiently allayed the concerns that Segal had raised. Jukes concluded in his report that "the author's depiction of Ukrainian and Polish peasant antisemitism is with a few qualifications stated below, historically accurate".

The manuscript was then assigned to Neil Thomas. Thomas was sent the manuscript, along with both Segal's and Jukes' reports, in January 1994. He later expressed that he had some doubts about the novel's quality at the time and that he had found it uneven and immature. Thomas wrote in a report to the publisher that the novel "teeters on the edge of apologetics". But he was satisfied by Jukes' report that the manuscript's historical interpretation was plausible, and ultimately agreed to edit it. 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. Darville at one point falsely claimed that Segal and Dowrick had both been fired by Allen & Unwin after refusing to edit her manuscript. But despite this acrimonious relationship between Darville and her publisher, the novel was ultimately cleared for publication in August 1994 with only minor changes from the Vogel-winning manuscript.

Initial reception

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 that "there's potential for a shitcan to be tipped over me with this book".

But despite these fears, the book's initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive. In a review in The Canberra Times, Peter Pierce described the novel as "one of the most distinguished winners" of the Vogel award, while noting that its author had opened herself up to "spurious assaults" by those who did not appreciate her use of fiction to interpret the historical complexities of the Holocaust. In The Courier-Mail, Frank O'Shea called the novel a "fascinating and courageous piece of imaginative writing". 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".

Reviewers reserved particular praise for the book's detached, unemotional style. Reviewing the book in The Age, Andrew Riemer praised the author's "precise, dispassionate prose" and wrote that Darville's literary aim of helping the reader to understand how ordinary people could commit horrific acts was, in his view, both entirely legitimate and carried out with great skill. 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. Cosic remarked directly on the author's purported Ukrainian ethnicity, noting that the novel demonstrated that the children of the Holocaust's perpetrators had just as much of a need to "exorcise their demons" as the children of Holocaust survivors.

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". 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. Geason also wrote that the novel skated over the long history of eastern European anti-semitism. Riemer, while giving an otherwise positive assessment of the novel, noted in his review in The Age that it would likely trouble some readers due to its failure to explicitly condemn its characters. But these concerns regarding anti-semitism were, at least at first, relatively muted. Darville received a mostly positive feature in The Australian Jewish News following the book's release, which concluded that her intentions were honourable.

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. 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 working class in commission housing and had won a scholarship to a private school, where she had graduated as dux. She said that she had been embarrassed by her "bedraggled pack of scrappy people", and spoke of how proud her family had been when they poured vodka over her head at her high school graduation. Darville claimed that her Ukrainian father Markov Demidenko was a taxi driver while her Irish mother was a domestic worker. In one interview Darville described how the Vogel award had changed her family's lives, claiming that it 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.

Awards

The Hand that Signed the Paper was the winner of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award, widely regarded as Australia's most prestigious literary award. The 1995 Miles Franklin judging panel was composed of University of Sydney Chancellor Dame Leonie Kramer, literary critic Jill Kitson, head of the State Library of New South Wales Alison Crook, and English professors Harry Heseltine and Adrian Mitchell. 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. All but Grenville's were their authors' debut novels. On 1 June, The Hand that Signed the Paper was announced as the winning novel. 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".

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. In his view, the novel was generally regarded as an "immature though compelling first novel" that was deserving of the Vogel — an award designated for emerging writers — but not the Miles Franklin. While some speculated that the judging panel's decision was attributable to a growing fetishisation of "multicultural chic" in Australian literature, both Riemer and Robert Manne were sceptical of this hypothesis, noting that the judging panel featured several members known for their literary conservatism. One member of the judging panel, Adrian Mitchell, later wrote that Darville's purported migrant background played absolutely no role in the panel's decision. 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.

Darville's Miles Franklin win attracted her immediate media attention. Darville said in an interview shortly after the Miles Franklin announcement that the Jews "who have constructed a fair bit of their identity around being victims don't like being told that, well, sometimes you were victimisers too". Darville also expressed in an interview following the announcement that she did not see the need to make a clear distinction in her novel between Jews and communists. Darville expanded on her motivations for writing the novel in an interview with ABC Radio, explaining: "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. Robert Manne argues that unlike the Miles Franklin judging panel, the ALS judging panel — composed of three academics from the University of Western Sydney — had "all over it the background noise of a contemporary, vaguely left-wing, vaguely post-modern Australian literature department". But Peter Kirkpatrick, one of the three members of the ALS judging panel, would insist that the Darville's presumed Ukrainian ethnicity had no impact on the judging panel's decision.

Controversy

Accusations of antisemitism

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. The column provided a scathing assessment of the novel; Bone criticised its claim to be a "a book of extraordinary redemptive power", questioning the merits of redemption for "men who bayoneted Jewish babies and machine-gunned hundreds of innocent people". Bone insisted that there could be no "other side" to the Holocaust. She also criticised the novel for presenting a false historical narrative, noting that Jews had been hated in eastern Europe for hundreds of years prior to the famines in Ukraine and that it was therefore false to blame Jewish involvement in the famines for Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis. Bone also questioned whether it was the book's narrator or its author expressing anti-semitic sentiments, writing that, "If Helen Demidenko condemns the anti-Semitism of her characters, I wish she had said so more clearly".

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. Others quickly joined the debate in The Age. History professor 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. Jacques Adler, a history professor 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".

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, writing that "individual Ukrainians, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with the Germans. Individual Jews, albeit in quite large numbers, collaborated with Bolshevism". She also 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". Darville also wrote that her critics were wrong to read the book as a work of history, and that while it was rooted in thorough research, its narrator Fiona Kovalenko was not intended to represent herself. Darville, falsely claiming to be a lawyer, 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.

Darville's defence of her novel appeared in the pages of The Age alongside a scathing 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. That evening, Darville debated Henderson on ABC television. Darville denied that she regarded Jews and Bolsheviks as synonymous, saying "I am not at any stage saying that Jews and Bolsheviks are one and the same. However a number of my characters do maintain that and there is some...historical foundation for that". 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. 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.

On 29 June, 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". Dershowitz claimed that the novel sought to explain and even justify Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust, and that its author had only written the book as a work of fiction in order to "smuggle her views into the mouths of her characters". He argued that Darville's goal in writing the novel had been to use it in furtherance of her opposition to the war crimes trials in order to ensure that Nazi war criminals would go unpunished. On 9 June, literary critic Peter Craven gave a more mixed assessment of the novel in The Age, writing that it was a talented and powerful novel, but that it featured a degree of historical ignorance and sought to portray a false parity between the atrocities committed against Ukrainians and those committed against Jews. Professor Robert S. Wistrich described the novel's thesis as "more dangerous than any form of Holocaust revisionism".

While criticism of the novel continued to mount, others defended the novel and attacked its critics for being politically correct and censorious. An editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that adherents of "PC fiction" would always be uncomfortably close to suggeting that "dangerous" novels should be banned. David Marr continued to defend 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". Marr noted that he himself had found nothing anti-semitic about the work. George Pappaellinas, editor of the literary journal RePublica, concurred and wrote that, "There have been moments when I've found the self-righteous mouthings of critics of this novel indistinguishable from the ignorance and even the fundamentalist stupidity of Rushdie's critics". 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". Others blamed the Jewish community; conservative columnist Frank Devine described the 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.

Darville's identity revealed

On 19 August 1995, journalist David Bentley revealed in The Courier Mail that Helen Demidenko was actually Helen Darville, the daughter of English migrants Harry and Grace Darville, and had no Ukrainian ancestry. Bentley had become suspicious after noticing Darville's vagueness about where she had been educated. He uncovered her true identity after speaking to her high school principal Robin Kleinschmidt. Kleinschmidt had up to this point kept Darville's true identity to himself, despite her having made a number of false statements to the media about her time at the school. He had instead sent her a legal letter in April of that year. But after being approached by Bentley, Kleinschmidt revealed the truth. Bentley's story in The Courier Mail would go on to win him the 1995 Gold Walkley.

At first, many of Darville's defenders refused to believe Bentley's story. But on 21 August, members of Darville's family publicly confirmed her true identity. Her brother told the media that her Ukrainian ancestry had been "a great marketing exercise". 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. She claimed that she had dropped the name "Darville" while writing her book in order to protect her family and sources. It was soon reported in the press that Darville had also pretended to be French and Czech while at university, and that she had committed plagiarism while a student in 1990. On 25 August, a statement with the headline "Helen Darville Apologises" was published in newspapers around 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".

Following the revelation, criticism mounted towards those who had defended her novel. 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. Author Guy Rundle wrote in The Age that the saga was "perhaps the most shameful literary deception of recent times", and that it had revived "discredited and mendacious hypotheses about the background to Eastern European anti-semitism and complicity in the Holocaust". 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. 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".

Many of Darville's fellow novelists were equally critical. Fotini Epanomitis told The Age that while a book should, in theory, stand on its own, the fact that Darville had tried to justify her novel by claiming that it was a family history made her answerable to her critics. Thomas Shapcott described the novel as "not bad, but not outstanding", and said that he thought it was pervasively anti-semitic. Kate Grenville, who had also been shortlisted for the 1995 Miles Franklin Award, described the novel as "astonishingly badly written".

Others continued to defend Darville. Frank Devine wrote that the criticism amounted to "miserable, philistine treatment of a young writer of talent". Leonie Kramer, who had served on the Miles Franklin judging panel, wrote that she was "puzzled" by the "sustained, 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". David Marr, who had been another of the novel's strongest defenders, described the revelation as "deeply sad" and said that while it did not in any way detract from the quality of the work, it undermined Darville's attempts to defend the novel by referencing her supposed family's first-hand experiences. Philosopher Peter Singer defended the novel, writing that it was not an anti-semitic work and that it did not attempt to minimise or justify atrocities. He attributed the controversy to the media's tendency to treat everything as a "kind of sporting contest" rather than being willing to engage in mature intellectual debate.

Critics noted that Darville's claims of Ukrainian ancestry had been used to lend credibility to her work. Darville had strongly implied, although she had never outright claimed, that the work was autobiographical. 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. Newspapers also noted that Darville's apology made no mention of her other falsifications, including her claim to have practiced as a lawyer and her 1990 plagiarism incident. Robert Manne wrote that the episode exposed the blindspots of the Australian literary establishment and its "pretensions of academic post-modernism and sentimental multiculturalism". 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.

The new wave of controversy would only add to the novel's sales; by 23 August, it was reported that the novel had sold about 25,000 copies. Between 1 July and 7 October, the novel sat in first position on the fortnightly Weekend Australian bestseller list on all but one occasion. Following the revelation of its author's identity, Allen & Unwin announced that the novel would be re-issued under the name Helen Darville and that it had sold the rights to an undisclosed American publisher.

Plagiarism accusations

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. On 31 August, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Darville had plagiarised additional passages from Gossip from the Forest, Robin Morgan's The Demon Lover, and a Ukrainian collection called The Black Deeds of the Kremlin. The night before, Allen & Unwin had frozen distribution over the book over the plagiarism concerns. Additional examples of plagiarism in The Hand that Signed the Paper would continue to be reported throughout September.

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. On 8 September, supply of the novel was restored after Allen & Unwin announced that they were "satisfied that allegations of plagiarism cannot be justified". 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.

Darville's fellow writers were divided on the question of whether plagiarism had occurred. Ivor Indyk said that the plagiarism "attacks the very foundations of the book", while Thomas Shapcott said that what had occurred was appropriation rather than plagiarism. 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. Judith Ryan described Darville's copying as "flagrant", but noted that it did not constitute plagiarism in a legal sense. Riemer wrote that the novel contained relatively extensive appropriations that came close to plagiarism.

New allegations of plagiarism would soon emerge. On 3 October, Brian Matthews wrote in The Age that Darville had plagiarised passages from his memoir in an essay about her fictional ethnic upbringing she had recently published in RePublica. Darville had written him a letter on 16 August informing him that a friend of hers had pointed out that passages in her essay, which was soon to be published, resembled a story that Matthews had written. Matthews agreed that Darville's essay looked uncannily similar to his own work and asked Darville to remove those sections, but later learned that the essay had been published in RePublica unaltered.

In January 1996, Andrew Riemer published The Demidenko Debate, casting critics of The Hand that Signed the Paper as culturally censorious. Manne criticises Riemer for implying that Demidenko's opponents threatened legal action against the book and that they were opponents of free speech, writing that he could not find any evidence of meaningful legal threats. Alba agrees.

Peter Christoff wrote in Arena that "In Europe, Demidenko's book would immediately be seen for what it is—a shallow, immature and ultimately anti-Semitic novel—and widely judged unworthy of publication, let alone a national literary prize. Perhaps the novel's success is more a reflection on the naivete and ignorance, moral complacency and Anglocentrism of the judging panel than on the book and its author."

The saga caused a significant breakdown in relations between Australia's Jewish and Ukrainian communities.

Analysis

While the novel had somewhat faded from the media spotlight by 1996, the debate continued in academic and literary publications. 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 literary critic and author Andrew Riemer, also published by Allen & Unwin, under the title The Demidenko Debate. In June, a fourth book was added with the publication of Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust.

Manne continued to be highly critical of the novel, writing in his book, "I found the book laughably inadequate to its subject and unmistakably antisemitic, in a way I had long since assumed no Australian literature could be. I found it morally and historically shallow, coarse and cold, even technically quite incompetent." Manne argued that no European publisher or literary judging panel would have considered touching the novel, and that the saga demonstrated the Australian literary establishment's naivety, historical ignorance, and embrace of a distorted kind of sentimental multiculturalism. He criticised defenders of the novel for praising its "moral complexity" and detached and unemotional style. To Manne, the book's avoidance of emotional affect and its reluctance to 'take sides' ought not to have been seen as virtues given its subject manner. He concluded that while the book did not deny the historical reality of the Holocaust, it denied its "ultimate inexplicability" and its significance by casting it as an ordinary episode in a long history of reciprocal clashes between Ukranians and Jews, concluding that the novel was a work "not of historical but of cultural or moral revisionism".

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, recalled that when he initially read the book he was impressed by Darville's bravery in broaching such a sensitive topic and by her skill as a writer. He admitted that he was troubled by parts of the novel's subtext, but that he kept reminding himself that its author was of Ukrainian descent and that she must have inherited some of her family's prejudices. 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". Riemer argued that the novel should be interpreted as a work of fiction, and that the blurring between fiction and discursive writing led to "many passionate but often ill-founded expressions of outrage". Riemer felt that Darville herself was partially to blame for repeatedly referring to her novel as a work of "faction" — part fact, part fiction — and that by doing so she had encouraged critics to interpret her novel as a manifesto. He concluded that the case of Darville's critics had been weakened by their inability to engage with the novel in literary terms and by their use of hyperbole and ad hominem arguments. He argued that the critics were often hysterical, attributing this to the fact that the novel "touched an open wound" for many of them.

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 much more conservative, Orthodox, and tight-knit than in Sydney. 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 hannukiah. Darville herself had attributed criticism of her novel to the "Jewish lobby". Others, however, argued forcefully against this claim. Manne noted that the Jewish press took a generally favourable attitude towards the novel until the controversy erupted in the mainstream Australian press, and that the Jewish community's political leadership had played a minimal role in the saga. Journalist Michael Gawenda concurred, pointing out in an article in The Age that many of the book's fiercest critics, including Helen Daniel and Gerard Henderson, were not Jewish, while some of the book's strongest defenders, including Andrew Riemer and Peter Singer, were.

Many of the novel's critics argued that it demonstrated the flaws of postmodern approaches to literature. The philosopher Raimond Gaita argued that novel showed that post-modernism's strong scepticism of truth and objectivity can lead to the compromise of moral and spiritual values. In his view, the novel's amoral numbness is a fundamentally inappropriate response to evil. Gaita noted that "there are many speakers in the novel, but in an important sense there are no voices". Manne expressed a similar argument, writing that, "We never feel in The Hand, either directly or indirectly, the kind of authorial presence which is capable of throwing light on the radical evil we encounter in its world." 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 postmodernist literature. He suggested that the controversy over the novel was attributable to the Australian public's discomfort over the postmodern and morally relativistic approaches that had taken hold in academia. Judith Ryan wrote that the inconsistencies and anachronisms in both Darville's novel and her public persona make "Helen Demidenko" a postmodern persona and The Hand that Signed the Paper a postmodern text. Ryan thought that it was possible that the novel was in fact an attempt at a critique of post-modernism, but ultimately concluded that it was instead a "thought-provoking yet ultimately confused attempt" at an exploration of literary post-modernism.

Some defenders of the novel, echoing Roland Barthes' notion of the "the death of the author", argued that the novel should be interpreted solely as a work of literature independent of its author's goal or identity. However, others criticised this view, arguing that Darville's public presentation as Demidenko was intrinsic to fully understanding the novel. Several scholars have also argued that Darville's performance as Demidenko violated an implied trust between the reader and author of an autofictional work that the author will present the truth.

Literary scholars have debated the authorial voice of The Hand that Signed the Paper.

Scholars have also used the Demidenko saga as a case study in Australian multiculturalism. The literary scholar Sneja Gunew has argued that the saga 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". She noted that many in the literary establishment had a strong desire for authentic, first-hand migrant stories. Zora Simic argued that by presenting herself as Demidenko, Darville "enacted her own critique of multiculturalism"; specifically a critique of the "ethnic essentialism" of Australian literature. Jane Hyde concurred and argued that 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. The Holocaust scholar Avril Alba suggested that the novel also revealed the "shaky foundations" of Australian multiculturalism in the 1990s, reflecting the tension between those who believed that in order to move forward it was important to forget and reconcile past injustices, and those who believed that this reconciliation itself posed a threat to multiculturalism. Gunew observed that the Demidenko hoax had led other ethnic writers and texts to be treated with derision and suspicion in Australian literature, and argued that texts based on ethnic or multicultural themes deserved to be read in a less simplistic manner.

Commentary on the novel has also explored what it suggests about anti-semitism and approaches to the humanities in Australian society. Many critics of the novel argued that the novel's success demonstrated a concerning lack of historical literacy in Australian academia regarding the Holocaust. Peter Christoff wrote that, "in Europe, her book would immediately be seen for what it is — a shallow, immature and ultimately anti-Semitic novel — and widely judged unworthy of publication, let alone a national literary prize". Robert Manne concurred, arguing that the novel revived the Nazi myth of Jewish Bolshevism and that no civilised European publisher would have considered touching it. He argued that Australia's positive reception of the novel demonstrated its collective historical amnesia regarding the Holocaust and its cultural unmooring. Susan Moore argued that the novel demonstrated the deteriorating quality of humanities education in Australia. Others argued that the saga showed that many Australians, including leading academics and authors, were wholly incapable of recognising anti-semitism. Peter Morgan suggested that until around 1990, applying the techniques of postmodern literature to the Holocaust was seen as fundamentally inappropriate, and that The Hand that Signed the Paper was part of a wider trend of increasingly adventurous and autofictional works about the Holocaust. Thomas Shapcott saw 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".

Anne Waldron Neumann wrote that "in condemning everything, post-modern theory condemns nothing". Neumann criticised this view, arguing that while fatwas and legal threats were clearly inappropriate responses, it was important that society maintain the ability to publicly praise and condemn.

Gaita argues that the lack of any serious portrayal of remorse compromises the novel's intention of shedding light on the nature of evil. Gaita argues that the novel presents the perpetrators of the Holocaust not as anti-semites but as Jew-haters, and thereby undermines the distinctive evil of the Holocaust. Gaita notes that the book caused deep pain to Jews because it denies the Holocaust — not by denying its occurrence, but by denying that it was caused by anti-Semitism.

"One of the reasons that The Hand is so repellent to so many of its readers is, then, that we sense that the narrative sensibility which guides it is willing to stand idle in the presence of the world of radical, genocidal antisemitism it has brought to life."

"It seems to me altogether undeniable that the overall effect of Demidenko is to suggest that the Bolshevik regime was inspired by Jews, favoured Jews, and was dominated by Jews; that the nastiest parts of the communist apparatus were Jewish; and that, under the Bolsheviks, the Jews together with the Russians were the oppressors of Ukraine. It seems to me equally undeniable that, on a mind innocent of historical understanding, the impression this book would leave is that the Bolshevik regime was a largely Jewish concern and the Jews the chief agents of Ukrainian suffering in the 1930s."

Sneja Gunew summarises the argument that the novel was antisemitic as being that the author created little distance between herself and the narrator, while offering little condemnation or moral overlay to her narrator's perspectives.

Rachel Morley argued that Darville's public performance as Demidenko lent authority to her writing. She rejects the notion that the book ought to be analysed as a literary work distinct from the author's performance of identity, arguing that "Darville's book is substantially different to Demidenko's". Morley argues that the saga in fact demonstrates the limitations of both extremes: a full embrace of the 'the death of the author' or of author-centred criticism. She writes that the saga is an important case study that exposes flaws in critical theory.

Members of the Ukrainian community were angered by Demidenko's portrayal of Ukrainians as collaborators with the Nazis, but were also angered by critics' rejection of "equal responsibility". Alba argues that the saga revealed a concerning lack of historical literacy regarding the Holocaust among Australia's literary establishment. Alba argues that rather than demonstrating Australia's liberalism and tolerance, as Riemer argues, the saga instead demonstrates Australia's historical illiteracy.

Stephen Lehane Smith has described the saga as "one of the most notorious literary hoaxes in Australian history". Smith points out that it is hard to interpret the novel solely as a work of fiction given that the initial manuscript used Darville's own assumed surname, Demidenko, for its characters. He argues that Demidenko's assumed Ukrainian identity lended authority to the novel. He also notes that the saga raised questions about when it was appropriate to apply historical criticism to literary fiction. Smith argues that it is reasonable to expect fiction to live up to these standards. He points out that one of the failures of Darville's novel is that it largely presents a single perspective, without using the metanarrative of the text to challenge its characters' prejudice or the partiality of the novel's historical interpretation. Smith describes the novel as a misuse of postmodern techiques.

Sue Vice notes that Darville misquoted some of her historical sources in a way that shifted the perspective from victims and eyewitnesses towards perpetrators of the Holocaust. But Vice gives a defence of the novel as a polyphonic text, applying the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to argue that the novel features a multitude of voices that should not be interpreted as an authorial voice. Vice criticises the "literal-minded and litigious response" to the saga. Vice describes the novel as "outstanding" in demonstrating how ordinary people came to participate in the Holocaust. Vice rejects the idea that the novel requires a "morally upright, omniscient narrator". However, Vice does note that the novel's polyphony is not always effectively utilised within the text, writing that its "ironizing of 'ordinary' perceptions of atrocity" could have been sharpened. Vice writes that the novel "testifies to the great power and potential of the polyphonic novel and dialogized heteroglossia".

But by 2007, Vice wrote that she was "no longer convinced that The Hand does exhibit genuine polyphony", and that instead "its apparent multi-voicedness conceals a fixed and undemocratic agenda". She writes that the novel's narrator exhibits a fascination with antisemitism and a tendency to glamorise the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Vice attributes Darville's assumed identity to a "tendency to self-romanticize". Vice argues that critics misinterpreted the novel because its narration is difficult to pin down, but that in fact the novel ought not to be interpreted as narrated by Darville herself. Vice instead identifies a "non-diegetic third person narrator". Vice admits that the novel's style and tone makes it "disturbing to read", but that its detached, amoral style is appropriate for its content and literary purpose.

Hannah Courtney argues that Darville's false identity was the violation of an assumed trust with her readers. She argues that the paratext — the assumption that the work was, at least in part, autobiographical — shaped the audience's interpretation of the work.

Courtney notes that while the omniscient narrator does not themselves express anti-semitic sentiments, they do not condemn the anti-semitism that pervades the novel.

Courtney argues that, contrary to Manne's assertion, there is evidence in the novel that Fiona is omniscient narrator and the editor of the entire collection of stories. She argues that Fiona is an unreliable narrator collating, editing, and narrating the voices of the past for her own purpose—to write her past the way she wishes it to be written." However, she notes that the novel does not make this fact clear, and that this is the cause of the accusations of anti-semitism levied against the novel.

But Courtney also notes that Darville's performance as Demidenko encouraged the audience to identify her with Fiona, and therefore implies that the author herself shares Fiona's antisemitism. She writes that "there is confusion between character, narrator, implied editor/author, fake author, and real author.

Serge Liberman described the book as "articulate, strong and well-constructed", but noted that its "historical interpretation and moral sensibilities" were a more complicated story. He argues that the book provides an "alibi" for the Holocaust's Ukrainian perpetrators, told through its characters but not questioned by its narrator. Liberman is critical of Darville's choice not to offer any moral judgements or moral commentary. He writes that what emerges is a "near-schizoid dissociation" between the horrifying stories that Fiona Kovalenko is told by her father and uncle, and her acceptance of their pathetically weak explanations. Liberman attributes the book's weaknesses to Darville's lack of historical understanding and her lack of curiosity.

Peter Christoff argued that "with its uncorrected historical distortions, its silences, omissions and moral relativism, the novel nevertheless serves as a subtle handmaiden to overt anti-semitic 'revisionism'" Christoff notes that the novel suggests that Ukrainian anti-semitism emerged ex nihilo and had an immediate justification, rather than dating back hundreds of years. He described the novel as an unreflective reproduction of dangerous anti-semitic propaganda. He argued that the suggestion that Holocaust perpetrators like Fiona Kovalenko's uncle were the victims of the war crimes trials moved the novel from mere moral relativism towards outright revisionism. He described the Miles Franklin award as a "tokenistic, confused attempt to recognise 'multicultural' contributions to Australian literature.

Ron Shapiro argued that Darville's portrayal of Jews fell into well-established stereotypes of Jews as dangerous conspirators.

William Schaffer describes the work as a "multi-vocal" text. Schaffer notes that many of the book's defenders falsely suggested that critics sought to have the work censored or banned. Schaffer criticises the notion that a work should exist entirely in isolation as "absurd". Schaffer writes that the novel's "facile bid for the universality of benign resignation" means that it collapses the Ukrainian famine and the Holocaust into a single narrative while entirely evading the question of anti-semitism. He notes that the novel at no point reflects on the uniquely systematic nature of the Holocaust or its rootedness in centuries of anti-semitism.

Morag Fraser wrote that the novel's numbness was an inappropriate vehicle to convey the evil of its subject matter. He concluded that it was a flawed and sometimes inept novel, but not a work of "devious propaganda".

Peter Kirkpatrick viewed the novel as a multi-vocal text, with Fiona Kovalenko serving as an intermediary for the voices of the novel's other characters.

Mendes notes that none of Demidenko's critics ever asked for the book to be censored or banned.

Mendes described Darville as a "compulsive liar".

Mendes suggests that the novel suggests that Australians don't understand anti-semitism and are unable to recognise it.

Ron Shapiro describes The Hand that Signed the Paper as a "morally neutral" book in which lots of voices say appalling things, but in which the author provides no moral guidance.

The novel casts Fiona's uncle, not his Jewish victims, as the main victim of persecution — first by Jewish Bolsheviks, then by the Australian government.

See also

• 1994 in Australian literature
• Ern Malley hoax
• Mudrooroo

References

Sources

Books and book chapters

• Alba, Avril (2019). "A Failure of Memory?: Revisiting the Demidenko/Darville Debate". In Gilbert, Shirli; Alba, Avril (eds.). Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 9780814342701.
• Gunew, Sneja (1996a). "Performing Australian Ethnicity: 'Helen Demidenko'" (PDF). In Rowley, Hazel; Ommundsen, Wenche (eds.). From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement. Geelong: Deakin University Press. ISBN 0949823562.
• Manne, Robert (1996). The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust. Melbourne: Text Publishing Co. ISBN 187584726X.
• Morley, Rachel (2007). "From Demidenko to Darville: Behind the Scenes of a Literary Carnival". In Heilmann, Ann; Llewellyn, Mark (eds.). Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan London. pp. 73–86. ISBN 9780230005044.
• Riemer, Andrew P. (1996). The Demidenko Debate. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 1864481099.
• Ryan, Judith (2003). "After the "Death of the Author": The Fabrication of Helen Demidenko". In Ryan, Judith; Thomas, Alfred (eds.). Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780203957776.
• Smith, Stephen Lehane (2019). "Telling the Big Lie: Obfuscation and Untruth in Helen Demidenko/Darville's 'The Hand that Signed the Paper'". In Williams, Emma; Sheeha, Iman (eds.). Deception: An Interdisciplinary Exploration. Boston: Brill. pp. 63–72. ISBN 9781848883543.
• Vice, Sue (2000). Holocaust Fiction. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415185530.
• Vice, Sue (2007). "Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper: Who is 'Helen Demidenko'?". In Morrison, Jago; Watkins, Susan (eds.). Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan London. ISBN 9781403995841.

Journal articles

• Courtney, Hannah (2019). "The paratext as narrative: Helen Darville's hoax, The Hand that Signed the Paper". Journal of Narrative Theory. 49 (1): 82–108. doi:10.1353/jnt.2019.0003. ISSN 1549-0815.
• Gunew, Sneja (1996b). "Performing ethnicity: The Demidenko show and its gratifying pathologies". Australian Feminist Studies. 11 (23): 53–63. doi:10.1080/08164649.1996.9994804. ISSN 0816-4649.
• Mendes, Philip (April 1996). "Jews, Ukrainians, Nazi war crimes and literary hoaxes down under". Patterns of Prejudice. 30 (2): 55–71. doi:10.1080/0031322X.1996.9970188. ISSN 1461-7331.
• Meyer, Tess (2004). "Stereotypes and the autobiography of a fictional author: Helen Demidenko's ethnic performance in the light of her short story "other places"". World Literature Written in English. 40 (2): 40–51. doi:10.1080/17449850408589389. ISSN 0093-1705.
• Morgan, Peter (2020). "The ethics of narration in Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper". AJS Review. 44 (2): 368–383. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000033. ISSN 0364-0094.
• O'Connell, Kylie (1996). "(Mis)taken identity: Helen Demidenko and the performance of difference". Australian Feminist Studies. 11 (23): 39–52. doi:10.1080/08164649.1996.9994803. ISSN 0816-4649.
• Shapiro, Ron (1996a). "Ethics, the literary imagination, and the other: The hand that ought, or was imagined, to have signed the paper". Journal of Australian Studies. 20 (50–51): 42–50. doi:10.1080/14443059609387277. ISSN 1444-3058.
• Shields, Kirril (2 January 2016). "Reshaping the Holocaust: Australian fiction, an Australian past, and the reconfiguration of "traditional" Holocaust narratives". Holocaust Studies. 22 (1): 65–83. doi:10.1080/17504902.2016.1158539. ISSN 1750-4902. Retrieved 18 May 2025.

Magazine articles

• Christoff, Peter (August 1995). "Assassins of memory". Arena. No. 18. pp. 44–48. ISSN 1039-1010. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Gaita, Raimond (December 1995a). "Remembering the holocaust: Absolute value and the nature of evil". Quadrant. Vol. 39, no. 12. pp. 7–15. ISSN 0033-5002. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Gaita, Raimond (September 1995b). "Literary and public honours". Quadrant. Vol. 39, no. 9. pp. 32–36. ISSN 0033-5002. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Fraser, Morag (1995). "The begetting of violence". Meanjin. Vol. 54, no. 3. pp. 419–429. ISSN 0025-6293. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Harboe-Ree, Cathrine (October 1994). "The Hand That Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko". Australian Book Review. Vol. 165. ISSN 0155-2864. Retrieved 17 May 2025.
• Hyde, Jane (November 1995). "On not being ethnic". Quadrant. Vol. 39, no. 11. pp. 49–52. ISSN 0033-5002. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Kirkpatrick, Peter (December 1995). "The Jackboot doesn't fit: Moral authoritarianism and The Hand that Signed the Paper". Southerly. Vol. 55, no. 4. pp. 155–165. ISSN 0038-3732. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Laster, Kathy (1995). "Crime and Punishment". Meanjin. Vol. 54, no. 4. pp. 626–639. ISSN 0025-6293. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Liberman, Serge (1995). "On Helen Demidenko's 'The hand that signed the paper'". Southerly. Vol. 55, no. 3. pp. 161–174. ISSN 0038-3732. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• McPaul, Christine (1999). "Curtain up: The Demidenko/Darville performance". Southerly. 59 (2): 156–164. ISSN 0038-3732. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Mitchell, Adrian (1996). "After Demidenko: The curling papers". Southerly. 56 (4): 110–126. ISSN 0038-3732. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Moore, Susan (October 1995). "Home truths". Quadrant. Vol. 39, no. 10. pp. 10–17. ISSN 0033-5002. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Neumann, Anne Waldron (November 1995). "The ethics of fiction's reception". Quadrant. Vol. 39, no. 11. pp. 53–56. ISSN 0033-5002. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Schaffer, William (September 1995). "The book that evaded the question". Southerly. Vol. 55, no. 3. pp. 175–184. ISSN 0038-3732. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Shapiro, Ron (1996b). "The Darville/Demidenko affair: Jew and anti-Jew in Australian fiction". Westerly. 41 (2): 104–117. ISSN 0043-342X. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Simic, Zora (2007). "The wog in the room". Overland. 187: 38–41. doi:10.3316/ielapa.200707159. ISSN 0030-7416. Retrieved 18 May 2025.
• Windsor, Gerard (August 1995). "Forum on the Demidenko controversy". Australian Book Review. Vol. 173. p. 17. ISSN 0155-2864. Retrieved 17 May 2025.

Newspaper articles

• Knox, Malcolm (9 July 2005). "The Darville made me do it". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 16 May 2025.
• Pierce, Peter (20 August 1994). "The burden of remembrance". The Canberra Times. p. 55. Retrieved 16 May 2025.
• Riemer, Andrew (24 September 1994). "The sun over Bondi". The Age. p. 9. Gale A295771904.
• Cosic, Miriam (20 August 1994). "The evil within: blind revenge of the victims". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 9. Factiva smhh000020011030dq8k00i5u.
• Geason, Susan (4 September 1994). "War criminal next door". The Sun-Herald. p. 128. Factiva shd0000020011030dq9400433.
• Alhadeff, Vic (26 August 1994). "Analysis of mindless hatred". The Australian Jewish News. p. 5. Retrieved 17 May 2025.
• Bone, Pamela (9 June 1995a). "A harsh sting in the tale". The Age. p. 15. Gale A295546148.
• Dershowitz, Alan (29 June 1995). "The ultimate abuse excuse". The Age. p. 17. Gale A295481978.
• "PC fiction". The Sydney Morning Herald. 8 July 1995. p. 28. Factiva smhh000020011026dr7800eq5.
• Marr, David (26 August 1995). "Australia's Satanic Verses". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 4. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8q00l93.
• Rundle, Guy (23 August 1995). "'Tactical error' a vile tragedy". The Age. p. 17. Gale A295435639.
• Adler, Jacques (22 June 1995). "The hand that hides an ugly history". The Age. p. 13. Gale A295482809.
• Wheatcroft, Stephen G (21 June 1995). "The voices of fascism". The Age. p. 16. Gale A295482983.
• Armstrong, Judith (17 June 1995). "Swords cross over the terror of words". The Age. p. 9. Gale A295483453.
• Demidenko, Helen (27 June 1995). "Stories and stereotypes — critics miss the mark". The Age. p. 15. Gale A295482219.
• Henderson, Gerard (27 June 1995a). "A fraction too much 'faction'". The Age. p. 15. Gale A295482220.
• Buchanan, Rachel (27 June 1995a). "War of words over prize novel". The Age. p. 3. Gale A295482234.
• Koutsoukis, Jason (29 August 1995). "Helen Darville 'set out to distort'". The Age. p. 5. Gale A295435054.
• Singer, Peter (16 September 1995). "Fiction, faction, fact And literature". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 33. Factiva smhh000020011026dr9g00nfw.
• "More of the best of 1994". The Sydney Morning Herald. 10 December 1994. p. 11. Factiva smhh000020011030dqca00s1v.
• Loane, Sally (24 January 1995). "Let's be honest, money is everything". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 5. Factiva smhh000020011026dr1o002z2.
• Bennie, Angela (2 June 1995). "First novel wins Helen the nation's top prize at 24". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 3. Factiva smhh000020011026dr6200cih.
• Voumard, Sonya (11 July 1995). "Controversy has a hand in Demidenko's solid sales". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 16. Factiva smhh000020011026dr7b00f90.
• Freeman, Jane (21 August 1995a). "A fraction too much faction: how Helen took us for a ride". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 1. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8l00jvg.
• Henderson, Gerard (22 August 1995b). "Faction, fiction or propaganda: Ozlit should be blushing". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 13. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8m00k18.
• Roberts, Greg (23 August 1995). "Will the real Helen Demidenko please step forward?". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 2. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8n00keg.
• Freeman, Jane (26 August 1995b). "Helen sends her sincere regrets, signed Darville". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 1. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8q00lep.
• Roberts, Greg; Makler, Irris (26 August 1995). "A fictional life: the fertile mind of Helen Darville". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 27. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8q00lj7.
• Manne, Robert (26 August 1995). "The great pretender". The Age. p. 7. Gale A295435316.
• Buchanan, Rachel (26 August 1995b). "Author apologises for her literary lie". The Age. p. 1. Gale A295435341.
• Shenon, Phillip (26 September 1995). "For fiction, and fibbing, she takes the prize". The New York Times. p. 4. Retrieved 17 May 2025.
• Gawenda, Michael (9 October 1995). "Criticism need not signify a conspiracy". The Age. p. 12. Gale A295338055.
• Bone, Pamela (12 January 1996). "The blame does not lie with Helen Darville". The Age. p. 10. Gale A294407946.
• Craven, Peter (9 July 1995). "Innocent reaction to the brutal facts". The Age. p. 10. Gale A295629790.
• Freeman, Jane; Buchanan, Rachel (21 August 1995). "Literary storm brews over author's tall tale". The Age. p. 1. Gale A295435991.
• Bone, Pamela (30 June 1995b). "We must show war criminals that all is not forgiven". The Age. p. 11. Gale A295481766.
• Stone, Deborah (27 August 1995). "Novel hoax a question of fact or fiction". The Age. p. 9. Gale A295628714.
• Jopson, Debra (21 August 1995a). "Grenville's Dark Places wins place in the sun". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 9. Factiva smhh000020011026dral00qin.
• Jopson, Debra (31 August 1995b). "Demidenko novel withheld after new plagiarism claims". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 1. Factiva smhh000020011026dr8v00jot.
• Jopson, Debra; Freeman, Jane (1 September 1995). "Miles Franklin judges wait on inquiry". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 3. Factiva smhh000020011026dr9100jvu.
• Jopson, Debra (8 September 1995c). "Publisher clears author Darville of plagiarism". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 5. Factiva smhh000020011026dr9800lnn.
• Gibson, Rachel (8 September 1995). "Darville's hand clear of copying allegations". The Age. p. 3. Gale A295439337.
• Matthews, Brian (3 October 1995). "My Demidenko story". The Age. p. 13. Gale A295338789.
• Rutherford, Andrew (11 February 1996). "The hand that stirred up the controversy". The Age. p. 9. Gale A294914465.
• Greenwood, Helen (1 June 1996). "The Demidenko effect". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 6. Factiva smhh000020011015ds6100ddl.

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• 1994 Australian novels
• Miles Franklin Award–winning works
• ALS Gold Medal–winning works
• Novels involved in plagiarism controversies
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