Byline: Helen Demidenko

Helen Demidenko responds to critics of her Miles Franklin Prize- winning debut book. IT SEEMS that some people don't like the way I tell a story. That's inevitable, of course, although some of the criticism has bordered on the hysterical. Though I didn't set out to write a history, The Hand that Signed the Paper has often been read as if it is one. But then, I'd say any text where the author's foremost ambition is to tell a story, when read as a work of history, will be found wanting. This happens when people compare literary apples with oranges. None the less, writing fiction is no excuse for sloppy research. History is often a species of selective memory, and the fiction writer using historical material must read broadly across many sources. I am also a lawyer by training; I have a strong instinct for seeking the truth at the bottom of a collection of facts. With regards to Ukrainian collaboration in World War II, I examined the facts and did what any lawyer would do: I searched for a motive. The most persistent "charge" I've had to face argues that by detailing Jewish involvement in the perpetration of the Ukrainian famine (1930-33), I provide an anti-Semitic apologia for those Ukrainians who subsequently guarded death camps and patrolled ghettos. In establishing motive, I have somehow provided justification. All Ukrainians are brutal, it would appear, and I am happily defending them. Jacques Adler (The Age, Friday) even claims that "no survivor's testimony has indicated any substantial evidence...