I n accepting such definition we thus allow Wilkomerski to demonstrate that
authorship can be a form of historical scholarship approaching that of autobiography
and that Fragments makes clear that both Holocaust scholarship and authorship are
necessarily anachronistic: however much they are grounded in research, their
representations of the past are motivated by present cultural values. Wilkomerski’s
hoax thus prompts a reconsideration of the distinctions that are currently drawn
between autobiography, Holocaust literature and authorship. Authorship can be
considered a form of Holocaust literature, but an authorship now redefined as not
derivative, not self-originating. Holocaust literature authorship is not sui generis;
writing dependent on pre-existing subjective cultural materials, selected by the
author, arranged in an order of priority, and written according to specific and
subjective values. Rather it seems that Wilkomerski, out of the trauma of his own
life, accessed a dimension of feeling and emotion that rendered itself as valid, not
fraudulent, even to those who had personally experienced such horrors.
A similar event happened in the Australian literary scene in 1994 when Helen
Demidenko published The Hand That Signed The Paper, which subsequently won
the Vogel Award for a first novel in 1994, followed in 1995 by the Miles Franklin
Award, as well as the Gold Medal of the Association for the Study of Australian
Literature. Although published as a work of fiction it was supposedly based on the
life events of her alleged Ukrainian family, albeit that Demidenko's real name is
Darville and that her Ukrainian ancestry was invented. The novel relates events of
the Holocaust in the Ukraine, which Helen Demidenko falsely claimed to have drawn
from the experience of her Ukrainian family. Most reviewers and critics of
Demidenko, including Robert Manne, Kathy Laster, Don Anderson, Michael
Heyward, and Peter Craven, have all drawn comparisons to the notorious Ern Malley
Hoax.
What is clear is that in both cases the pretence of recollection demonstrates
that the marshland between memory, as, for example, in the case of the reflective
works by Primo Levi, a genuine Holocaust survivor, such as Moments of Reprieve
(1987) and Survival I n Auschwitz (1993), and recovered memory or fiction and
invention is treacherous. Mythopoeic fiction may be seen as a way of mapping and
understanding that marshland. This situation is not as uncommon as might seem
and is reminiscent of that relating to Martin Gray’s book For Those I Loved ( 1973 ),
which was also a Holocaust memoir that was exposed as fiction. Three other
works, although not claiming to be anything other than fiction, The Reader (1997)
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(Ron)
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