Customer Reviews

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER.

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My 1995 paperback of this Australian barn-burner opens with an author's note, thanking "friends and family who talked with me, ... who helped with translation and constructive criticism." Claiming descent from an Irish mother and Ukrainian father, Demidenko wrote that events on which the novel was based were true: "it would be ridiculous to pretend that this book is unhistorical." She'd used "historical events and people where necessary."

She claimed that to have experienced "as a Ukrainian-Australian, a great deal of personal unpleasantness as a result of the war crimes trials." She had been "continually called upon to explain why Ukrainians had done this, why Ukrainians had done that." (Jerusalem Post, Jul. 23, 1995). Her narrator tells of an uncle, charged with war crimes, who hides under the kitchen table yelling: "The Israelis are coming to get me!"

The novel opens as Soviet Jewish "commissars" arrive in Ukraine. The narrator alleges that they inflicted famine and suffering. That, she claims, "was how the hate started." As her uncle goes to trial, the narrator says, "My sister is starting to hate, my sister who never hated anything."

Far from historical truth, this book is something of "an apologia for genocide," as French resistance veteran and Melbourne University historian Jacques Adler observed. It ignores the 17th century Ukrainian nationalist rebellion that killed tens of thousands of Jews as well as the Ukrainian murders of 100,000 Jews during the 1918 civil war. It portrays sympathetically a man who machine-gunned thousands and bayoneted a baby.

Demidenko blamed Jews for the Ukraine famine, which she claimed had caused Ukrainians to join the Nazi genocide of Jews, and made their actions understandable. These controversial claims generated news coverage, book sales, and possibly influenced judges for Australia's Vogel Literary prize, Miles Franklin award and Literature Society Gold Medal, all of which the book won.

Of course, the book generated a great deal of criticism, since Stalin actually caused the Ukrainian famine, as Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow shows conclusively. Among the critics were Melbourne Age columnist Pamela Bone, novelist and Vogel judge Roger McDonald, and Sydney Institute director Gerard Henderson, who believed the book unjustly forgave Ukrainian Nazi collaborators for Jew-hatred and murder. Some termed the novel an apologia for genocide. Critics expected it to comfort "racists and antisemites" from Australia to Russa.

Shortly after the novel's fourth paperback printing, Demidenko's high-school headmaster identified her and publicly exposed her claims and supposed family history as false. She is really Helen Darville, the daughter of English immigrants.

To her credit, Darville apologized publicly in August 1995, according to the Jerusalem Post. She had not taken oral family testimonies. Her father's family was not "killed by" Ukrainian "Jewish communists." Her father was Harry Darville. Her parents met in Scunthorpe England, not on a refugee ship.

Darville's false claims did huge harm. But to her further enormous credit, September 11, 2001 changed her heart. Australian newspaper reactions to the atrocities elicited Darville's public mea culpa in which she also condemned those who were "parroting Saddam Hussein and Mullah Mohammad Omar." (Sydney Morning Herald, "Were we U.S.-Bashers Wrong all Along?" Oct. 1, 2001)

A Democrat and daughter of a Green, Darville admitted that she had previously so actively siphoned "blame away from the perpetrators of violent crime" that her friends termed her views "parodic" and "Pythonesque." She wrote that her attitude had encouraged her to "take swipes at Israel and the Jewish lobby," and accuse both "without distinction" of reverse racism, and of exploiting the Holocaust for territorial gain.

But Darville reported her disgust when Palestinians cheered and "ululated with joy" as "planes carved into skyscrapers." The author-turned-teacher wrote that she was further sickened by repeated, widespread Palestinian hatred that went widely unreported, since the PA had "been busily preventing further filming." One BBC correspondent had sent her "a distraught email:" Yasser Arafat's police had "destroyed his camera and opened his head up with a truncheon."

Darville now reviled the notion that Americans should simultaneously "accept every carping criticism of their foreign policy (Israel, Iraq, Chile, etc)," along with murders of several thousand civilians and "respond peacefully." She now recognized that international cries to "End support for Israel" contained a "large amount of submerged anti-Semitism," which directly blamed Israel's "brutality towards the Palestinians" for the "attacks on America."

Darville rightly concluded that these arguments blurred the line between "atrocity, and what one condones." She explained that writing this book had also tempted her to adopt such reasoning, "We all know the Holocaust was heinous, but..."

But now she recognized that Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their anti-American Pakistani and Palestinian supporters wanted "to see all Jews dead." Writing this book had taught her about Nazi propaganda, she now reported, and the actions of those who currently supported such propaganda had crystallized for her their true intentions. "These people hate Jews so much that, consciously or unconsciously, they've come to identify with Nazis," she wrote.

She now reviled the attacks on America and Israel as well as those taking "the same glib and facile path I once took--thereby absolving not only the terrorists, but their state sponsors, of blame." She asked readers to stop blurring the "fine line between understanding and condoning atrocity." Well said, indeed.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Despite her very public lying, Darville put together an excellent novel. Its unusual style, and interesting point of view makes it a book worth reading. There's some truth to the complaint that a few of the characters are two-dimensional, though none are uninteresting. However, one must remember that this was her first novel, and few authors make no mistakes in their early works. This book shows that Helen Darville has tremendous promise, and I can only hope that the fiasco surrounding this work does not diminish from its status as a piece of worthwhile literature.

The purpose of this work was not to 'blame the Jews' for anything. The purpose was to construct a history from the "wrong side" and asess the implications of this. Whilst there remains a huge focus on the experiences of Jews during World War 2, we must be careful not edit out the experiences of other majority groups. . . The human being remains a construct of social and political machinery and that is intrinsically the point the text makes.
Throughout history (particularly over the last 150 years), groups have been exploited by Jews in high places. I am not justifying the barbarous reality of the holocaust, I am just indicating that certain elements of history have been blotted out, at the expense of human dignity and suffering of millions of Ukranians.
The novel remains a historical narrative, indicating a version of reality told from a marginalised point of view. Darville, should not be martyred for thinking outside social and historical limitations. In essence, the novel may be fiction but it is based on a historical reality.