Commentary: The Book of Fathers by Miklós Vámos
"As his throat constricted, he could taste blackberries and cranberries. The final image on the screen of his mind was of a fleeing flock of deer, running up the hill, reddish-purple dust swirling around their hoofs, their antlers scraping and scratching the sky that covered the ground."
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"The Book of Fathers" is a story of repetition-- images, like this one, appear like seasons, guiding the story forward just like the coming and going of harvests that have dictated our understanding of time for thousands of years. They arise according to their own schedule, yet feel new and mysterious to the young-- to the next generation embarking forward.
Miklós Vámos's most recent novel The Book of Fathers is a family saga stretching across 300 years of Hungarian history. Each chapter contains the life and death of the first-born son of each generation of the Csillag family beginning in 1702 and ending in 1996. The book's images, like the one above, are what tie the threads of life, death, Judaism, revolution, parenthood, and time itself together, forming bridges that span consciousness and chill the blood with disturbing and poetic repetition.
While the quote above captures what I love about Vámos's style, my favorite part of the entire book was the story of little Szilárd-- a gentle child who wants to fly. Raised primarily by his grandmother from the countryside, Szilárd's life changes dramatically when his mother-- a free-spirited performer-- whisks him away from his grandmother's cottage to an unfamiliar city and an unfamiliar stepfather. He cries for his grandmother, and (as if just to make me cry), he longs for the black cat who wandered his grandmother's house-- his only friend. Szilárd's only joy in his new home are the birds. The dovecote, where the birds live, becomes not only a sanctuary from the unruly Hungarian language that he can't quite master and, therefore, his loneliness, but it dually serves as a portal-- a place where he can taste the wind, raise his arms like a bird's wings, and look into the past, just as his father could, and his grandfather, and his great grandfather.
Here, as the pink dawn light catches the boy's imaginary wings, Szilárd finds his ancestors and pieces of himself. But he falls. The injuries inflicted from the fall, caused by his mother's panicked cry at discovering him at such a dangerous height, are lifelong. They are painful and noticeable, but in the stitches, time has laced itself tight. Now, he can see not only the past but pieces of the future. When our dear Szilárd dies at the end of the chapter, he is executed for treason against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his body is thrown into a ditch near the cemetery.
"Unfathomably, some hundred years later in the damp heart of the ditch a dozen or more potato plants began to sprout. Their tubers were caressed by the winds of the west. This, too, Szilárd had sensed somehow. By no means rare in his visions were the pale sad flowers of the potato plant."
As a writer obsessed with Time, I can not overstate how expertly Vámos crafts the echoes of time throughout this saga. Stunning images take shape in the minds of the current generation, appearing randomly in visions or dreams, frightening and alluring at the same time. Though the youth rarely know what the image means at first, they eventually come to understand. The Book of Fathers is the name of the family album passed from father to son across the generations. It contains the important life stories of each of the Csillag's firstborns. With each generation, it casts a long shadow, bringing wisdom, appreciation, and a new sense of identity to the owners. No matter how troublesome the generation, the album is kept safe-- a relic of seemingly insurmountable importance.
When the majority of the Csillag family are killed in the Holocaust; however, the lone survivor, Balazs Csillag, burns the Book of Fathers, demanding a severance between himself and the past that connected each generation to those who came before and those who came after. But the pain of seeing the last moments of his father in the gas chamber-- the scene quoted at the beginning of this post-- is too terrible a yoke for the young Csillag to carry on his own. The pain of his family's brutal murder outweighs any potential gifts granted by the Book of Fathers. The burning achieves its duty, but the following generations after are filled with a loneliness that is, in itself, another murderer-- lurking the pages.
The Csillag's inherited sense of memory-- strong enough to withstand every catastrophe before the Holocaust-- is assaulted in such a way that it never truly heals again. The next Csillags know nothing of the past-- their forgetting is forced upon them. And, with the last Csillag we come to know in the book's final chapter, he can barely remember the date or the phone number he is dialing. He flounders in forgetfulness, constantly seeking in a quagmire of silence for the voice of his ancestors to tell him who he is.
It is only with the birth of his son, Konrad, that memories begin to return to the Csillag family. We close the book on the day of a solar eclipse and little Konrad is doodling with crayons. On the paper, his father discovers a scene he doesn’t recognize, but we, the readers, do. “Cave, watch, beginning” are written above what looks like a battlefield, where cannonballs fly. To learn what little Konrad has drawn, I urge you to read the rest of The Book of Fathers.