Miklós Vámos - The Book of Fathers

I was myself but simple in those days, suspecting nought of the miracle to come. To me the darkness was but the evening falling sooner. Then I beheld the change in the color of the clouds, they and the land turned a deep shade of green. The air did cool apace. As the darkness thickened, so did the fright of the birds and the insects grow. They flew hither and yon and some fell dead on the ground. The dog with me howled a piteous howl. I was frighted unto death.

As the final sliver of the Sun darkened over, the stars of the night were seen of a sudden in the firmament. Thus far do I recall, then I lost hold of my mind. Meseemed my end was nigh, and that of the world also. Yet my story had hardly begun.

Later I heard from others what a magical sight I had missed: a diamond flame inwrapt the Sun, like unto a halo. They can rejoice, in whose sky the Lord has conjured such glory.

When this too had passed, it was said there came quickly a dawn, for the second time on that day. The affrighted beasts and folk rejoiced and bid welcome to the light reborn.

The publisher has asked me to write a few words about the historical background to the novel. Though I don’t really think it is essential to know anything about Hungary or its history to make sense of the novel, some readers may want to know a little of the broader context.

Some personal history first. The Hungarian original of this book was my twentieth publication in Hungary and my ninth novel. An earlier novel was about my mother, whose character, for me, was similar to that of the socialism that dominated our country for four decades. She was tyrannical, unfair, cruel, and unpredictable-but at the same time rather amusing. (I was born in 1950 and so grew up in a “softer” kind of socialism, which was not without its humorous side.) Some years later, I felt as though I owed it to my father to write a novel about him, too. Unfortunately, he was a man of few, if any, words. He had died when I was nineteen, and I didn’t know much about him.

So I decided to do some research. I went down to Pécs, in the south of Hungary, where my father had been born and his family lived. The archives revealed some enigmatic facts: my father had had two brothers, and his father had also been called Miklós Vámos. That Miklós, my grandfather, came from Nagyvárad (now Oradea, just inside Romania). He had owned a substantial shoe-shop in Pécs. His father, Mendel Weissberger, had owned a distillery in Budapest, but had himself been born in Homonna (now Humenné in the Slovak Republic). How had my greatgrandfather come to own a distillery in Budapest, while his son had been born in Nagyvárad? And how had my grandfather ended up with a shoe shop in Pécs? And what became of the distillery? I found no answers to these questions.

My father spent longer fighting in the Second World War than it actually lasted. He had been called up for maneuvers even before the war, targeting former territories of the Hungarian kingdom that had been swallowed up by neighboring countries after the First World War. During the war itself, he was a regular soldier until the enforcement of the Jewish Laws, when he became a member of one of the unarmed Jewish forced-labor brigades, sent ahead of German troops to sweep the minefields clean for them as they advanced on Moscow. He was one of the very few to survive. When the front collapsed, he fled with some others and was captured by Soviet troops, becoming a prisoner of war. He escaped with a friend, and it took him several months to walk home to Pécs. He arrived to find that his whole family had been killed by the Nazis.

I had not even known that I was a Jew. When in elementary school my classmates expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, I followed their example, believing “Jew” to be no worse than any other rude word. In high school, a girlfriend asked me if I was a Jew. I answered that I was not. I mentioned this to my father, adding that I knew we had nothing to do with the Jews. My father adjusted his glasses, and then said, “Well, I’m not so sure.” There was no further explanation. And that was how I learned I was a Jew. (I do not speak Hebrew or Yiddish; I don’t know the customs, the rules, the prayers. Nevertheless, whenever I hear of anti-Semitism, I know I am a Jew.)

Back to my father. Somehow he became a secretary to a minister, László Rajk, who was the victim of a showcase trial and executed. My father was fortunate to escape prosecution. He worked for seven years in a factory before he fell ill and, after a long period during which he was in and out of the hospital, died. That’s all I could find out about him-hardly enough for a novel.

What was I going to do? If I couldn’t write a novel about my father, why didn’t I write one about every Hungarian father? I picked one hundred of them, famous and unknown men, and started to collect their biographies. But that seemed a little boring. I decided to choose twelve of them who would represent the twelve astrological signs-they would stand in for every Hungarian male. In the original text, in each chapter the first name of the central character starts with the same letter as his sign. The “vignettes” that introduce the chapters try to create the mood of the relevant sign: the sentences were collected from old Hungarian calendars and yearbooks.

The novel describes the lives of twelve first-born sons in a single family, each the father of the next. This provided a solid and straightforward structure, and I sincerely hope the reader has no problem following the story, even if it is complicated in places. Please note that the Jewish name of the family is Stern and the Hungarian is Csillag-both mean “star.” I knew the final scene would have to be the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, since that was about the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. I tried to discover if there had been one roughly three centuries earlier and when I found that there had, the time frame of the novel was in place, and that is how it became a Hungarian family saga.

Many readers in Hungary, and some in Germany, have written to say how envious they are that I know the story of my ancestors so well. I wish that were true. As must be clear by now, I know virtually nothing. I have made up a family because I lost my real one. But I am not unhappy if readers think they are getting the story of my forebears.

It may also help the reader to know that the Hungarian nobility and those who counted as the intellectuals of Hungary spoke French and German until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only the poor used Hungarian, and the Hungarian language of the time lacked a great deal of vocabulary. One of the happiest chapters in the history of Hungarian culture is the period of intense language renewal towards the end of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Writers, poets, and linguists came together to create a modern Hungarian language and did so primarily by creating a large number of new words. I thought it would be interesting if in each chapter I used the words and grammar of the period in question. In the first three chapters, which take the story up to about 1800, I tried to use only words that existed at this time. I am aware that this is not something that can be easily re-created in translations into Indo-European languages, but I hope it is apparent that the language of the novel gradually becomes “younger” as we approach the present.

One well-known fact is that Hungary and the Hungarians have lost every important war and revolution since the time of the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus. He occupied Vienna and became Prince of Austria. He died in 1490. Since then, the nation and its heroes can be found only on the losing side.