1. Demidenko, Helen, The Hand That Signed the Paper (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin Australia, 1994)Google Scholar; Dale, Helen, The Hand That Signed the Paper (Balmain, NSW: Ligature, 2017)Google Scholar. Demidenko-Darville has more recently assumed her legal name, Dale, in her public persona as writer and columnist. I use Demidenko when referring to the original version of The Hand, Darville in reference to the author herself at the time, and Dale in reference to the author of the reissued version in 2017.

2. Cited in Jeff Sparrow, “The Return of Helen Demidenko: From Literary Hoaxer to Political Operator,” The Guardian, July 7, 2015.

3. In the wake of the controversy over The Hand, Helen Darville disappeared from public view, eventually studying law, and working as a legal assistant to Queensland Supreme Court Justice Peter Dutney. She moved to Britain in 2000 and returned to Australia in 2010, taking up a research assistant post with Liberal Democratic Party Senator David Leyonhjelm from 2015 until 2016. In 2006 Dale published an article in Quadrant, reviewing the earlier controversy. Since returning to Australia, she has pursued a public role as a commentator on current affairs, and in 2017 and 2018 published a two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked, retelling the trial of Jesus Christ under Pontius Pilate. She has resurfaced most recently (in 2018) in the Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian, as a commentator on issues of freedom of speech.

4. Susan Geason, “War Criminal Next Door,” The Sun-Herald, September 4, 1994, 128; repr. in Jost, John, Totaro, Gianna, and Tyshing, Christine, eds. The Demidenko File (Ringwood, VIC: Penguin, 1996), 13Google Scholar.

5. In the year following publication, media discussion of The Hand was intense. The documentation edited by Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing in The Demidenko File provides a comprehensive collection of newspaper articles and radio interviews. In addition, Manne's, Robert The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust (Melbourne, VIC: Text Publishing, 1996)Google Scholar, Riemer's, Andrew P. The Demidenko Debate (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996)Google Scholar, and Prior's, Natalie Jane The Demidenko Diary (Port Melbourne, VIC: Reed Books, 1996)Google Scholar appeared in the following year. Literary critic Riemer interpreted Demidenko's novel as a courageous attempt at presenting an alternative view of the Holocaust. For Riemer, a novel is inherently amoral and any attempt to place an explicit moral center will lead to the conflation of the work with the atrocities it portrays. In this spirit, Riemer rejected the accusations of antisemitism and cultural appropriation (“The Hand That Signed the Paper,” The Age, September 24, 1994, 9; repr. in Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing, Demidenko File, 16–19). For political and social commentator Robert Manne, however, the novel is discredited by the extent to which its historical inaccuracies support a latent antisemitism (“The Great Pretender,” The Age, August 26, 1995, 7; repr. in Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing, Demidenko File, 222–24). Like Gaita, Raymond in “Scepticism and Taboos: Reflections on the Demidenko Debate,” Eureka Street 6, no. 6 (July/Aug 1996): 46–9Google Scholar, Manne pointed to the narrative disingenuity of conflating Jews with Stalin's henchmen in Ukraine as a means of explaining, if not excusing, the involvement of Ukrainians in the Holocaust: Demidenko's thesis is essentially that the Ukrainians killed Jews in reprisal for the famine brought on by Stalin's policies in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. Prominent US attorney Alan Dershowitz condemned the novel as “one of the most pernicious and mean-spirited works of fiction” (“Holocaust Abuse Excuse ‘Fails to Disguise Murder Most Foul,’” Australian Financial Review, June 29, 1995, 16; repr. in Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing, Demidenko File, 71–4). For Riemer and for literary critic Ken Stewart, Manne's focus on the historical inaccuracies and their implications distort the novel's true significance. Stewart accuses Manne of applying nonliterary categories to a piece of “faction,” a term that Stewart considers unhelpful. “‘Those Infernal Pictures': Reading Helen Darville, Her Novel and Her Critics,” Australian Literary Studies 18, no. 1 (May 1997): 72–79. At the same time, in advocating the work as a piece of literature, neither Stewart nor Riemer accounts for the voice and the metatext in literary terms, leaving the work conceptually stranded as a novel with unexplained autofictional components. For literary academic Sneja Gunew, the novel brought to the fore important aspects of multiculturalism in literature in Australia at the time. “Performing Australian Ethnicity: ‘Helen Demidenko,’” in From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement, ed. Wenche Ommundsen and Hazel Rowley (Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press, 1996), 1–12. Other prominent figures in the Australian literary scene, such as David Marr, accused critics of confusing fiction with moralism (“Dabbling with Demons,” The Age, August 26, 1995, 17; repr. in Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing, Demidenko File, 217–22), while prominent journalist and commentator Padraic McGuinness defended Demidenko as a victim of those who would limit freedom of speech (“Charity for the Victim Caught Up in Fantasy,” The Age, August 29, 1995, 14; repr. in Jost, Totaro, and Tyshing, Demidenko File, 233–35).

6. Grzegorz Grochowski, “Pytania o niefikcjonalna proze dyskursywna” [Questions about discursive nonfiction], in Polonistyka w przebudowie [Polish studies under reconstruction], ed. M. Czerminska (Cracow: University of Cracow, 2005), cited in Pawel Zajas, “On the Nature of an Ordinary Bug: A New Perspective on Non-Fiction Research,” http://hdl.handle.net/2263/45639.

7. Zajas, “On the Nature,” 19.

8. Ibid., 18.

9. Ibid., 22.

10. Demidenko, The Hand, 55.

11. Ibid., 68.

12. Mark Baker in an interview with Caroline Baum, Between the Lines, June 6, 1997 and June 15, 1997, supplied by ABC Television to Fisher Library, University of Sydney.

13. Sebald, W. G., “Konstruktionen der Trauer: Zu Günter Grass Tagebuch einer Schnecke und Wolfgang Hildesheimer Tynset,” Der Deutschunterricht 35 (1983): 32–46Google Scholar; Sebald, W. G., “Constructs of Mourning: Günter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer,” in Campo Santo, trans. Bell, Anthea (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), 97–123Google Scholar.

14. Margalit, Avishai, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 174Google Scholar.

15. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–32Google Scholar.

16. See my detailed study of issues of autofiction and identity in Grass and Sebald: Morgan, Peter, “‘Your Story Is Now My Story’: The Ethics of Narration in Grass and Sebald,” Monatshefte 101, no. 2 (2009): 86–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. For Alyson Miller, fake Holocaust narratives such as The Hand parody the “tenuous nature of both the past and the notion of self” in the tradition of postmodern narrative. “Stylised Configurations of Trauma: Faking Identity in Holocaust Memoirs,” Arcadia 49, no. 2 (2014): 229Google Scholar. For Miller, these works question public notions of the real in terms of authentic identity and in relation to literary experience. Cf. also Elie Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust: Trivialising Memory,” The New York Times, November 6, 1989.

18. “Cultural appropriation” became a controversial issue most recently in Australia when American novelist Lionel Shriver opened the Brisbane Writers Festival on September 7, 2016, with her hope that this latest expression of identity politics be nothing more than “a passing fad.” For Shriver, fiction, by its very nature, is illusory, and hence not to be subjected to the criteria of historical truth. “Lionel Shriver's Full Speech: ’I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad,’” The Guardian, September 13, 2016. Australian commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied weighed into this debate on the “ethics of narration,” criticizing Shriver's appropriation of other people's stories, and her unquestioning self-entitlement to be “allowed” to write, given that she will “never truly know another person's experience.” For Abdel-Magied, Shriver's lecture was an arrogant “monologue about the right to exploit the stories of ‘others.’” “As Lionel Shriver Made Light of Identity, I Had No Choice but to Walk Out on Her,” The Guardian, September 10, 2016. See also Susan Wyndham, “Lionel Shriver on Identity Politics at Brisbane Writers Festival and the Aftermath,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 14, 2016. The story was covered in the New York Times by Rod Norland, “Lionel Shriver's Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival,” The New York Times, September 12, 2016.

19. Dale, The Hand (2017), 3–4.

20. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Australian Accused of War Crimes in Ukraine to Stand Trial in January,” November 25, 1992.

21. The Weekend Australian Observer, October 6–7, 2018, 16.

22. The Australian Racial Discrimination Act, 1975, section 18C, includes the following language:

23. Hirsch, Marianne, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Postmemory,” Discourse 15, no. 2 (1992–93): 3–29Google Scholar; see also Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.