RK: In your trip on the trail, what did you discover that you couldn’t discover from reading about the issue in the papers?

RM: I think the main reason I went was to talk to her boyfriend, who had said some interesting things about her anti-Semitism which no one had known about for sure before. And I wanted to pick up the atmosphere at the University of Queensland and at her school. I thought an interesting part of the story was what happened on the inside in the publishing game. I knew that one of the key people at Allen and Unwin, the publisher, had been distressed about the book, and I wanted to talk to her – and to the Jewish editor who had been given the job when Stephanie Dowrick, the publisher, didn’t want to do it herself. Then I talked to the man who actually edited the book, and to the historical advisor who had given the okay to Allen and Unwin to publish it.

RK: So if you were telling the fable of the Demidenko story from the point of view of the literary world, how would it go?

RM: Once upon a time literary judges connected with the Vogel Award thought they had come upon a really interesting work by a daughter of a migrant family which showed the other side of the Holocaust. One of them, Jill Kitson, was so excited by this, and the others were half convinced by it, that they awarded it the Vogel prize. To cut the fable short, for the next nine months, I think to the astonishment of the author, the book had an absolutely free run. It was treated politely, warmly, generously, and in the end with overwhelming enthusiasm by the Miles Franklin judges. I am certain that Helen Darville was convinced that there would be an absolute stink. Even the Jewish News, she discovered to her astonishment, interviewed her politely. In other words it’s an astonishing story of a text going through every stage from publication to prize-winning and so on, without anyone observing that what they had was a deeply and ludicrously inauthentic text, and also one that was replaying one of the central themes of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda, which is that the Bolshevik regime essentially was the creation and production of a Jewish conspiracy.

RK: How do you regard the atmosphere of Demidenko enthusiasm that was about at the time of these judgments?

RM: Obviously it’s hard for me to understand how people were so enthusiastic about the text. I think in part it’s the sense of discovery that some people had, that a major new literary talent who was young, a woman, an ethnic – and an ethnic of a rather unromantic and unfashionable kind. With all of this, I think the sense of discovery was there. Also clearly a romantic idea of multiculturalism was at work. I also think – and this distresses me deeply – that there’s a kind of fed-upness with the Holocaust, with that story, that people find difficult to talk about, and maybe even to admit to themselves. I think it was rather exciting to think at least there was another story to be told about the Holocaust from the point of view of the perpetrators. In fact I think Germans were the perpetrators, and I feel sorry that the Ukrainians got caught up in this whole episode. I think also there was some kind of sense that the Jews had had control of the story for too long – how interesting it was to have another version. All of these things played some role.

RK: I suppose we have to ask why Australian critics smile benignly on a book you say is full of historical errors, misunderstandings, and anachronisms. Was it ignorance of the historical antecedents to the Jewish Bolshevik equation and the issues of history?

RM: I think it must have been. None of the reviews picked up the fact that this in some sense replayed the Nazi version of history. The first thing I thought of when I read it was that. It’s not surprising, because I’ve taught history in this area for a long time and, in a way, the first books that really got to me were to do with the ideology of Nazism. But I can only think that people didn’t pick this up. Eventually it took outsiders with an understanding of history to finally get the penny to drop on what I thought was one of the most obvious facts of twentieth-century European history.

RK: When you see Jewish Bolshevik in The Hand that rings alarm bells for you because, as you argue in your book, it’s actually impossible for the Jewish Bolsheviks to have been responsible for the Ukrainian famine.

RM: That’s right. It’s an idea whose history is so shabby and so utterly disastrous – because it was one of the fundamental underpinnings of the Holocaust – that it seems to me no-one with historical understanding would touch it. It’s an idea which was once common in the 1920s but which eventually led to humanity’s most terrible moments. To see it so naively replayed is bad enough, but to have an entire literary community not noticing – I was really shaken by it.

RK: Was it that history in Australia can be simply a matter of history or text, rather than a matter of bodies and blood?

RM: Yes, I think it is true that Australians do not and cannot understand the darkest periods of human suffering in history. I think it’s one aspect of Australia’s history that is genuinely dark. In general the kinds of things that many European migrants have gone through is really very far from the imagination of Australia. There is a playfulness and frivolousness that Helen Demidenko or Helen Darville had in regard to the Holocaust, even to the Ukrainian famine, which did not immediately repel an Australian audience – who only feel remotely the meaning of such events. I think for those whose families are closer to the events the book is very repellent, very quickly, partly because of its frivolousness and terrible ignorance.

RK: How do you read the battle between the critics of The Hand and the defenders of The Hand?

RM: Pamela Bone of The Age started the criticism and people like myself, who would not have read the book, then read it. For a long time it was, I think, political scientists, historians, philosophers, or, it must be said, a Jewish audience of intelligence that began reading the book and one by one were astonished by what they’d read. Particularly the Jewish readers were slightly destabilised reading it, having to reflect upon the fact that the literary community had regarded it as a great work. And all of us separately: I know for sure that there was no hand, as it were, working behind the scenes trying to orchestrate a campaign. The opposite is true, that the organised Jewish community didn’t want to look bad. But a lot of individual readers were shocked. A nasty battle developed in which, if there’s a serious claim that emerged, it’s that the forces of so-called political correctness were posing a threat to free speech.

RK: And you say that free speech was never at issue.

RM: In the deepest, and only meaningful sense of the word, it wasn’t at issue because no one called for the book to be suppressed. People were saying that free speech was threatened by a kind of censoriousness. Really, political correctness may be at work, because it seems to me you have to be able to distinguish between those literary cultural products which are part of a worthwhile conversation and those which are either disgusting or worthless or ignorant, and in my view in the end degrading to us as human beings.

RK: What do you think the debate about The Hand has meant for Australian literary culture?

RM: A very considerable part of the literary community, or at least a not unimportant part, had expressed enthusiasm, warmth, generosity. It was reviewed by almost everyone favourably. Now I think it poses a very destabilising question, a disturbing question for the literary and cultural community: how could this have happened, without its being noticed for so long? And also questions about judgment, about the quality of our reviewing, about the historical knowledge that can be assumed in a literary community. It calls into question things about the quality of the literary culture in the country in a very serious way.

This edited version of the interview broadcast on Radio National’s Books and Writing is printed here courtesy of Radio National

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