After the “Death of the Author”

In 1994, an Australian writer using the name Helen Demidenko published a novel that she allowed to be read as a thinly disguised version of her immigrant family’s history. The Hand that Signed the Paper is narrated by a fictional Australian university student named Fiona Kovalenko, whose uncle, a postwar immigrant to Australia from Ukraine, has just been charged with war crimes during the Nazi period. The relation of this story to the Ivan Polyukhovich case of 1991, in which a 73-year-old Australian was accused of aiding a massacre in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1942/3, would have been evident to anyone who spent time in Australia during the early 1990s. ¹ Fiona’s story is told partly in her own voice and partly through “oral histories” gleaned from her uncle Vitaly and her aunts Kateryna and Magda. Given the similarity between the last name of the author, Demidenko, and that of the framing narrator, Kovalenko, ² most of the novel’s early readers saw it as a courageous venture in which a young Australian overcame understandable reticence in order to wash her family’s dirty laundry—their collaboration with the Nazis—in public. In the narrative itself, the fictional Fiona underscores this point several times. “It’s hard to own things when they’re bad,” she writes. “To admit they belong to you” (p. 41). Later she comments that the sheer act of writing about her uncle’s participation in Nazi atrocities gives his history a character it did not have for her before: “It has permanence, now. I must own it” (p. 84). The underlying notion, that Australia needs to “own”—and own up to—the shame and guilt of some of its citizens’ pasts, gave The Hand that Signed the Paper an allure of boldness that commended it to many of its first reviewers.