The Demidenko File
John Jost, Gianna Totaro, Christine Tyshing, (eds)
Penguin, 1996, 300 pp., $14.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/12329
Helen Darville's prize-winning novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, is an anti-Semitic apology for the Holocaust. Yet certain conservative and liberal intellectuals who were sucked in by Darville's "Demidenko" scam have brought on the debate by their stubborn refusal to admit being conned or to recognise the extreme right-wing ideological foundation of Darville's novel. Prominent conservative academic Leonie Kramer, one of the Miles Franklin Award judges, has surfaced to abuse critics of the novel as baying hounds, vultures, hyenas and enemies of freedom. But The Demidenko File, which records the media's coverage of the affair, shows that Kramer is groping to defend the indefensible, that Darville does indeed have a problem with Jews and that her novel is an artistically meagre and morally pathetic attempt to justify genocide. The main character in the novel, a Ukrainian peasant, welcomes the Nazi invaders in 1941, joins the SS death squads and becomes a guard at the sadistic Treblinka death camp. He had seen his family, village and fellow Ukrainians starved during the famine caused by Stalin's forced collectivisation in the Ukraine in 1930-33, and now seeks revenge against the "Jewish Communists". Cause ("Jewish-communists") and effect (mass murder of Jews) is Darville's simplistic explanation of the Holocaust. The complete absence of any counterposing views in the novel portrays the slaughter as inevitable, indeed justifiable.
Faked legitimacy
To lend her novel legitimacy, Darville invented a Ukrainian background and claimed that the novel was "faction", based on oral history and the experiences of her family, such as the murder of her grandfather by "Jewish communists". When the scam was exposed, these lies profoundly affected, or should have, the assessment of her novel. The lies mattered because Darville, and the Miles Franklin judges, made them matter, claiming that Darville's Ukrainian persona lent authenticity to her novel's theme. The judges' wounded cries to the contrary are a paltry attempt to deny that they were sucked in to heaping praise, awards and money (at least $125,000 from grants, awards and royalties) on a smelly lemon. Not all readers were duped, or insensitive to the novel's anti-Semitism. Three writers refused to edit the novel even before Darville's ruse was tumbled — Brian Castro, Stephanie Dowrick and Lynne Segal. They found its prose dull and flat, its characters one dimensional, its anti-Semitism stark. Segal did not make it past page 50 — the endless repetition of "fucking Jews" in the manuscript becoming unbearable. Darville, when a member of the Young Nationals, was noted for her extreme conservatism and opposition to trials of Nazi war criminals. Her boyfriend revealed her obsession with the fantasy of Jewish control of society. Darville's statement that the book "contains some hard lessons for Jews", i.e. that they got what they deserved in the Holocaust, is the menacing voice of modern fascism.
Revenge
Darville has tried to be more subtle about her anti-Semitic novel by appealing to a more general theme that violence begets violence. However, one can not excuse mass murder by saying we are all capable of it. The Russian Revolution in 1917 (to its cost) was exceptionally generous to the defeated generals and others from the old order, and the defeat of the murderous puppet regime in South Vietnam in 1975 did not lead to the "communist bloodbath" that was predicted by supporters of the Vietnam war. Darville's message that the Jews deserved what they got is reinforced by appealing to a staple of League of Rights propaganda that the world is threatened by a Judeo-Bolshevik menace. All the Jews in Darville's sick little book are cartoon baddie "Jewish-communists", which makes them doubly damned. Historically this is up the spout. Although a few top bureaucrats like Kaganovich, who led the forced collectivisation in the Ukraine, were Jews, they were only a minority in Stalin's party (which did not hesitate to stoke anti-Semitic prejudices when it suited Stalin's purposes). Anti-Semitism existed in the Ukraine long before the likes of Kaganovich came on the scene. Many Ukrainians initially welcomed the Nazi invasion in 1941 and collaborated in an environment where Nazi propaganda exploited anticommunist and anti-Russian feelings which bred from Ukraine's history of national oppression. But the glee with which some Ukrainians participated in the ensuing slaughter of Jews is explained more by the long-standing pathology of anti-Semitism than the facile thesis that revenge is an inevitable human behaviour. Not only is Darville's history shonky, but it takes the diseased mind of an anti-Semite even to bother with a person's Jewish identity. Jewishness matters only in the sense of membership of an historically oppressed group whose rights must be defended, but to Darville and her kindred racists, sniffing out a person's Jewish identity becomes a fetish.
Right split
The right was split over the issue of anti-Semitism in its reaction to Darville's novel. Reactionaries like Leonie Kramer, Ron Casey and P.P. McGuinness have defended the novel, but others like Gerard Henderson and Robert Manne have been vehemently critical. The latter recognised the anti-Semitism and judged this to be unacceptable, or at least unwise. They have sought to distance the right from the political turf inhabited by the League of Rights maniacs. One wonders, however, whether they would be so keen to support the cause of historical veracity and moral integrity if it was just the Bolsheviks (they use the term interchangeably for the genuine Bolsheviks and the Stalinist impostors) who were to be exterminated. Their right-thinking predecessors in the Russian Civil War, Churchill's cabinet and the Pentagon suggest an answer — some people really do have it coming to them. With Darville we have a slightly mad, very right-wing, person of mediocre talent, an anti-Semite nutty about Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracies, not afraid to lie and plagiarise to win fame and money. Why her most prominent liberal defenders — the ABC's Jill Kitson and David Marr — have obstinately refused to see that the literary queen has no clothes is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps it is not wanting to admit to having goofed. Perhaps it is their belief that in literature anything goes, no matter how amoral, which gives rise to an alarming casualness about anti-Semitism or the need for historical truth. The Demidenko affair has revealed a persistent strain of anti-Semitism and, one might add (as no-one does in this collection from the mainstream media), anticommunism just below the surface of some conservatives and liberals in Australian society. Kramer has compared criticism of Darville's novel to a fatwah, out of keeping with "our tolerant and fair-minded society". Kramer has lost it — it is anti-Semitism that is intolerant, and it is the critics of Darville who are carrying the banner for tolerance and humanity.