Holding Time

by

Nicki Leone

There is an old cemetery in the town where I live that has been in existence since the mid 1800s, although some of the graves are much older than that, having been relocated to this shady, idyllic spot when their original resting places were disturbed—either by natural disaster or design. Some date as far back as the early 1700s, that they have survived at all is something of a miracle.

The cemetery is designed as a park, and many of the older family plots are crammed so full there is hardly space to walk without stepping disrespectfully on someone’s interred feet or head. And yet, strangely, these same over-crowded plots often sport stone or elaborate ironwork benches—and sometimes several chairs—as if they were expecting people ambling by to be in need of a place to stop and rest (albeit, not eternally).

In fact this outdoor gravesite furniture is an emblem of an earlier age, when it used to be common practice after church service, or during significant family events, or even on a holiday to visit the family plot en masse armed with a picnic lunch. There, the matriarch of the family would seat herself on a bench and the younger generations would cluster around, and listen as she recited the family history, pointing to each grave as she went through the line of fathers, uncles, grandmothers and great aunts, working backwards as far as there were stories to tell.

I found myself thinking of those empty ironwork benches as I was reading The Book of Fathers, a story set half a world away from the faded glory of a Victorian graveyard in the American South. Written by Hungarian author Miklos Vamos, the novel follows the lineage of a single Hungarian family—the Csillags—from father to son, father to son, down through three hundred years and twelve generations. And in the stories of these twelve men is the story of Hungary itself—a beautiful and sometimes tragic land that has, as the author points out, never once been on the winning side of a war in all those centuries.

When a novel attempts to cover such a long expanse of time and such a great expanse of history, there is a tendency to use words like “sprawling” and “sweeping” and “epic” and “saga” to describe it. In fact, some of these words can be found right on the back of the book. But despite its ambitious scale none of these words are really appropriate for The Book of Fathers. The reader is not swept away in a vast saga, but rather, taken by the hand and led along a portrait gallery in some ancient, crumbling castle, stopping to linger at each new picture. This is a novel told not as a sweeping saga, but as a series of “once upon a time” tales. The reader sits at the feet of the storyteller, as children used to sit at the feet of that old Southern family matriarch, listening as she pointed to each grave and performed her introductions to their kin.

The novel begins, then, on an early spring morning long ago. “Tiny shoots push through the soil. Virgin buds uncoil at the tips of branches. Soft, fresh grass sweeps and swells across the meadows. Thornbushes blossom on the hillsides. The walnut trees have survived the winter, though their antlered crowns still stand bare. Fresh leaves reach longing for rain from the sky.” On such a day in the year 1705 an old man, Grandpa Czuczor, and his daughter Zsuzsanna Csillag and grandson Kornel, arrive in the Hungarian village of Kos, after a period of exile in Austria. The old man is a printer by trade, who ran afoul of the authorities as printers often did—malcontents that they all are. Czuczor was not a malcontent, but as he could both read and write, he came naturally under the suspicion of the Austrian authorities, who mistrusted educated men, and looked down upon Hungarian men as ignorant and uncouth peasants. (It is a peculiar talent of governments, to believe several opposite things of the same man simultaneously and without irony).

Grandpa Czuczor settles his family in the village—which means he finds a house, buries his money in the back garden, and sets up shop as a printer. He also writes an account of the journey in a large folio—having a printer and bookbinder’s respect for the permanency of the written word, he hopes to bequeath the book one day to his grandson. That first account of the return of Czuczor to his native Magyar, becomes the first entry in what the Csillag family (the name means “star”) comes to call “The  Book of Fathers,” a journal passed down to the eldest male child in each generation, who then were called to add their own stories to the pages.

The beauty and peace promised by that first gentle spring day does not last. A Hungarian prince decides to rise against his Austrian overlords and ushers in the first of those three hundred years of losing wars. The village of Kos is destroyed. Czuczor and his daughter are killed. But the boy, Kornel Csillag, survives, living wild in the woods although seriously injured. He pilfers from the bodies strewn across the fields, finding clothes and leftover food and even a small, gold egg-shaped time piece he puts in his pocket. The Book of Fathers survives as well, and on the eve of the closing of the year, Kornel lays in a field of ruin, book clutched in his hand and his eyes blinded by a solar eclipse and the first of a series of visions of the past and future that will haunt his family for generations.

There is a magical, fairytale feel to The Book of Fathers that often has critics or reviewers muttering about “a Hungarian Garcia Márquez,” which, granted, would be a fine thing to be, but I think such comparisons are a little facile.  The “magic” in the story—embodied in the mysterious little time piece that seems to endow its owners with the ability to see into the past or future in moments of great stress (they are a common occurrence on wedding nights)—is actually a rather brilliant device for telling a story the way stories, and history, often come to us—in bits and pieces, out of context and disorganized, an upturned box of puzzle pieces with only fragments of the picture visible. Certainly the Csillags, who become the Sternovskys, then Sterns (the names still evoke stars), then Csillags again, do not use this gift or curse for much of anything except to keep a watchful eye out for the women they are fated to marry. After all, what use, really, are visions of electric trains to a vintner in the early 1800s? Or the sudden sight of potato flowers growing in a ditch that will not exist for hundred years yet? The visions of the past are equally unhelpful. The men learn songs beloved by their ancestors, (the family is musical) and occasionally get a little help in picking up a foreign language. Apparently nothing is so useful to a person trying to learn German as being constantly haunted by the vision of an ancestor who spoke it. Some of the family even have visions of where old Grandpa Czuczor buried his gold all those years ago, but no one ever manages to go and dig it back up. Presumably it is still there.  No, the only thing one knows is that all these glimpses of the past and future are somehow connected, but if there is a grand design it eludes the men granted these sights.

“The ornate timepiece,” writes Richard Stern—the fourth to write in The Book of Fathers—“was found by my great-great-great grandfather, when he lived like a wild dog on the clearing known as Bull Meadow. When it came into my grandfather’s possession, he had it repaired. From him it passed to my father, Istvan Stern, who had to repair it himself on a number of occasions, so that it could once more show the day, the month, and even the year. Now it is mine. But it remains a temperamental little creature, as if it were not a timepiece but a traveler adrift in time. It loses a month or two now and then; on occasion it can be a decade in error.”

The Csillags may be “adrift in time,” but their habit of writing things down in their Book of Fathers tethers them to this earth and turns the fragmented, arbitrary experiences of their lives into actual story. In that sense, the book is more magical than the little vision-inducing timepiece. Visions are temporary and ephemeral. But things set down in books are permanent, fixed, and sacred. “Papers and books must not be thrown into the fire!” cries one man in the midst of one of Hungary’s periodic cultural “cleansings.” It is practically a family motto.

Vamos says in a note at the end of the novel that he wrote The Book of Fathers after an unsuccessful search for his own father’s family, which he had discovered, much to his own shock, was Jewish. After World War II—and once again, Hungary was on the losing side, under German control—nothing was left, nothing could be discovered of his father’s people. So, being a writer, when he could not find the story of his family, he decided to make one up. It is natural, I suppose, when reading a novel like this one, where each chapter belongs to a new character in the story, to develop favorites. To become especially fond of Nandor Csillag, the second rate opera singer, or Mendel Berda-Stern, the gambler with an obsession about Nostradamus. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that because of the author’s own history, the strongest chapters in the book are those of Balazs Csillag and especially his son, Vilmos.

Balazs survived, just barely, a Nazi concentration camp (one of his last visions is of his own father, the opera singer, giving his final and perhaps greatest performance to fellow prisoners in another camp, just before he is led off to the showers and murdered). Balazs’s answer to the past is to eradicate it as completely as the Germans had eradicated his family. He formally renounces Judaism, and converts to Catholicism. When a girl says to him “Pay attention to me and not the past!” he marries her. “I’m letting go of the past, I’m letting the past go to hell” becomes the new Csillag mantra. And his own entry to the Book of Fathers? Balazs refuses to write in anything except crossword puzzles.

This leaves his son bereft of the entire Csillag family inheritance. Vilmos is not granted visions, he does not get to read the Book of Fathers. He discovers he is Jewish by accident and his father is furious when he asks about it. He can find out nothing of his history or his father’s history or the family he comes from. The past is an utterly taboo subject. Time passes and the son never can find a way to break into the imposed silence that surrounds his distant, unapproachable (and very ill) father. He eventually resorts to writing him letters—filled with agonized questions of why? And who? And what happened?: “Ever since I’ve been aware of things you have always been ill, and our life consists of leaving you alone . . . any excitement is bad for you. Why does it count as excitement if we have a conversation?” Vilmos pleads. “Where did we go wrong, Father? When did it go wrong . . . What made it . . . Why?” And finally, “I feel I have come from nowhere and I suppose that someone who has come from nowhere is headed nowhere. Is that really how you wanted it? Father?”

It is a question that will ring harsh and true to any child of Holocaust survivors. By the time Vilmos Csillag finishes his extended letter, his father is dead. He delivers it anyway, leaving it in an envelope on top of his gravestone. But there are no iron benches nearby on which to sit and contemplate the past. There is no “family plot” for the Csillags. Not even the stone will survive another dozen years.

The Book of Fathers is riddled with allusions and commentary on everything from the nature of time and memory, to the role of religion, to musical theory, which makes it a fun (and sometimes funny) book to read. The curious-minded will find something to entertain in every chapter. There is also a deliberate structure to the novel that is impossible to miss, even in translation. That the chapters themselves each begin with some vivid pastoral scene, for example, as if to remind the reader that yes, this is the story of a Csillag, but it is also the story of a Hungarian. And it is no accident that the novel begins and ends with a solar eclipse, or that there are twelve fathers in the book and twelve signs in the zodiac. In fact, the author states as much when he says that each father in the chronicle corresponds to an astrological sign—and that their names even begin with the letters of the sign that rules them—at least, they do in Hungarian.

But structural games like this are of secondary importance—especially since they don’t translate well into English and many of the nuances and in jokes are lost. What is not lost, is the conviction that we are each the embodiment of all that came before, all that is yet to come, and all that exists beneath our feet. “Hungary” is not defined by the often-fought over borders on a map. It is the place where the Csillags are. Where Miklos Vamos is. And where their sons and daughters will be in times to come. “The longer winter takes a-dying,” begins the final chapter in The Book of Fathers, “the more spectacular will be the spring. On the last of the days of bitter cold, the land awakens to the morning chorus of the songbirds, and from the bottom of its heart years for the rebirth now approaching. There is not long to wait; soon we shall be welcoming the purest of colors, smells, tastes, forms and combinations, which may yet, in spite of everything, make the world a better place. At times like this it almost seems that nature is trespassing on the territory of art.”

So I take it back. There is something “epic” about The Book of Fathers. It is a “sweeping saga.” At least it is difficult not be swept away.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos (Other Press, 2009)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.