ABSTRACT
The ‘Demidenko affair’ caused a furore in Australia in the mid-1990s, following the publication of Helen Demidenko’s novel The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994). There were two main issues at stake in this critical and cultural scandal. First, Demidenko claimed that her text was ‘faction’. This provoked fury among those who were dismayed by her story of Ukrainians goaded by the JewishBolshevikinspired famine of the 1930s into eager participation in Holocaust massacres. Second, in August 1995 Demidenko was unmasked as someone quite other than the Ukrainian persona she had assumed since 1992; The Hand was actually written by Helen Darville, of Anglo-Saxon extraction. Added to these central features of the scandal were related ones concerning the originality of Darville’s work, which turned out to be reliant on historical and literary sources; the text’s attempt to ‘domesticate’ or even ‘humanize’ the actions of Holocaust perpetrators; and the fact that, while she was masquerading as Demidenko, Darville had won no less than three literary prizes for her novel.
