Byline: Gerard Henderson

LET'S JUNK the congratulatory niceties invariably associated with victors including annual winners of the Miles Franklin Award. Helen Demidenko's The Hand That Signed The Paper is a loathsome book all the more so because the author insists that her first novel is not just a work of fiction. Regrettably (and no doubt unintentionally) this book will give comfort to racists and anti-Semites from Australia's Lunar Right League of Rights to the fascist wing of Russia's Pamyat movement. The Hand That Signed The Paper contains an author's note in which Ms Demidenko writes that "it would be ridiculous to pretend that this book is unhistorical". She acknowledges that, where necessary, "historical events and people" have been used "throughout the text". Interviewed by Caroline Baum on ABC TV's Bookchat Magazine last Sunday, Demidenko went further. In response to a question, she conceded that her book was "faction", that is, part fact and part fiction. In a work of faction, it is difficult for a reader to distinguish the real from the imagined. But a reading of The Hand That Signs The Paper along with an examination of Helen Demidenko's interviews after her Australian/Vogel and Miles Franklin awards suggests the following interpretation: In Demidenko's view, there is a causal connection between the Ukrainian famine of 1930-33 and that part of the Nazi Holocaust which was carried out in the Ukraine circa 1941-43. According to this interpretation, after the revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union was controlled by Jewish Bolsheviks. Consequently, Jews were primarily responsible for the forced famine that was imposed on Ukrainians by the communist totalitarian rulers in Moscow. The impact of Soviet oppression in general, and the famine in...