Byline: ANDREW RIEMER

ANDREW RIEMER looks for a unique literary form. Illustration: TODD DAVIDSON. THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER, by Helen Demidenko, Allen & Unwin, $14.95. RECOLLECTIONS OF LUDOWYCK B, by Laurent Vitel, Meanjin, $11.95. IT SHOULD be obvious to even the least perceptive that almost half a century of migration has altered the fabric of Australian life. Successive waves of settlers - first from Europe, more recently from Asia and the Middle East - have exerted a profound influence on the food Australians eat, the entertainment they enjoy, the sports they play and even on their religious practices. Yet until relatively recently writing remained more or less isolated from those influences. Helen Demidenko's The Hand That Signed The Paper is a case in point. It won the 1993 Vogel fiction prize for young writers. As with the previous year's winner, Fotini Epanomits' The Mule's Foal, and Brian Castro's Birds of Passage (the 1982 joint winner), Demidenko's novel draws on the experiences of people whose origins lay outside Australia. Demidenko is the daughter of a family who had left the Ukraine after World War II, bringing with them their own histories of outrage and persecution. The story she tells is centred on the terrible, artificially induced famine in the Ukraine during the late '30s and early '40s, and on the enthusiastic way many welcomed the German occupation of their region. At its heart stand three young people, Vitaly, Evheny and their sister Kateryna, hardly more than children, unsophisticated, immersed in the superstitions and prejudices of a peasant society. Two of them, Vitaly and Kateryna, are caught up in the madness of the time to the extent that they stand guilty of committing, or at least...