The Book of Fathers was my twentieth book published in Hungary and my ninth novel. Earlier, I wrote a novel about my mother. She was mentally ill with manic depression. Her 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' variety of socialism, which was not without its humorous side.) In the eighties, I thought 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 great-grandfather 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.

That's all I could find out about my ancestors and my father - 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 decided to follow the example of Plutarch, with his 'Parallel Biographies', and picked a hundred of Hungarian fathers in the 20th century, famous and unknown men, and started to write their life story. But that seemed a little boring. Then I decided to choose twelve fathers who would represent the twelve astronomical 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 next step was to figure out that they should be the first born male members of twelve generations in one 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. It was obvious that the story of these 12 men should somehow symbolize the last 300 years of Hungarian history and the Hungarians as such.

2 Twelve generation and an impressive number of intermingling stories each one of them told in its own specific language. How did you shape your language to the passing time?

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. In Hungarian, that makes a significant difference. 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 event 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 am aware that this is not something that can be easily recreated in translations into Indo-European languages where such linguistic revolution dod not happen, but I hope it is apparent also in translation that the language of the novel gradually becomes 'younger' as we approach the present. For instance, the chapter that takes part in the USA is filled with Americanisms used by Hungarians.

It was easy to figure out that stylistic solution, but it was hard to achieve it. I read two dozens of books that were published in the years of the chapter in question. I made a lot of notes, and I tried to 'learn' the nice old words and expressions. In my family, we used that in those years I was writing the first three chapters, and no one could understand us. I did the same kind of preparatory reading for every chapters, but this became more and more simple as I approached the present.

The 'vignettes' that introduce the chapters try to create the mood of the relevant sign, that is, the on-month-long period of the year of each, therefore the sentences were collected (and reshaped) from old Hungarian calendars and yearbooks.

3 The Book of Fathers is the protagonist but there are many books (burned, destroyed) in the narration: is the novel also a kind of homage to the writing as a way to save memories?

Sure. I know the word 'message' sounds somewhat old fashioned. 'If you have a message, use the Western Union' - send a wire, that is, says the famous quote. But I am an old fashioned writer. I do not work if I do not think I have a message that I have to transfer. Many readers wrote me and were telling me the following or similar sentences: 'Dear Mr. Vámos, we read your novel. Then, we went to se our Grandpa (Grandma, Father, Uncle, etc.), and asked him about World War I., what was he doing on the battle field at Isonzo. We write down (taped) everything he said. We try to collect the story of our own family!' - and when I read or hear this, I know my message was understood. So, please follow the example, visit the older relatives and collect the memories until you can do that, because they'll die sooner than you think. Similarly, if you write a personal journal, that will be a God sent for your sons, daughters and grand children. And it helps you to stay mentally healthy, which is not bad either.

4. But is it also a novel about paternity and the pride of being a father?

Oh, yeah. I was very satisfied when young women came to me with the book on the stores asking me to sign it for their husband, because, as they said, they wanted to inform their husband with the Book of Father that in a matter of month they actually will become fathers. I think my generation reached the point when we miss our dead fathers more than before. Also, we take after them very much when we are looking into the mirror. So, it is the best time to think of our fathers with passion and compassion.

5 The book is almost a historical novel, except for the supernatural ability of the Csillag family of having visions; how come?

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. Unfortunately, this is not a historical novel. I wish I could write one, having the historical knowledge about my own family. As it must be clear by now, I know virtually nothing. I had to make up a family because I lost my real one. Since I know that my father, torn by the history, didn't want to remember the past and the fact that his whole family was destroyed by the Nazis, I thought it would be a good counter point if his ancestors had an extraordinary talent in remembering. But I am not unhappy if readers think they are getting the story of my forebears. When literature can be read as reality, the realistic writer has done a good job, I guess.

Still, there are a few autobiographic facts in the book. 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. But he wasn't in the temporary typhus hospital described. There was such a hospital, and the men were killed the way I described, just my father was not among them. He escaped with a friend, and it took him several months to walk home to Pécs. He arrived to find that in his whole family it was only him who was alive.

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, telling him 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 habits, 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 as a hand miller before he became ill and, after a long period during which he was in and out of hospital, died.

6 And why did you choose to frame the story with two eclipses?

Please note that the Jewish name of the family is Stern and the Hungarian is Csillag - both mean 'star'. I knew long before the first sentence was put onto the paper that the final scene of my novel would have to be the solar eclipse of 11 August 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 automatically set.

7 How was the novel met in Hungary?

It was like a fairy tale. The book was sold in 100 thousand copies in the first year of its publication, and it passed 250 thousand in 2005. I have the feeling that practically every reader bought it here - there are 10 million inhabitants in my country all together. One half of the critics were keenly praising it, but the other half was hostile. But this is true just about everything I have ever done, including my adventures in the Hungarian National TV or the prestigious literary publishing group I created in 1991 wit my friends. Of course, I feel offended when someone doesn't like what I do, but I know that he who is loved by everyone is actually not loved by anyone.

8 You are also a TV personality. Do you have in Hungary programs on tv about the culture specifically?

Well, I am a retired TV personality. My programs were popular for seven years, starting in 1995. I hosted artists, actors, writers, and basically they were telling their life story in a humorous way. But, I decided to go back to my den and write other novels. In 2003, I became a father again, that of twin baby boys. I had a daughter before who is now 28 years old. Nobody can say that I only try to convince others to fatherhood.

9 Once you said that life was more important than literature. Is that really so?

Absolutely. And I always tried to distill literature from life. If not from mine, then from the life of my relatives, friends, acquaintances or everyone else I knew or I read or heard about. The title of the only Hungarian literary weekly is 'Life and Literature'. I like this, and they stand in the same order on my priority list, too.