An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

Some

long cigarettes, explaining to her daughters-in-law why her husband was so quiet, why he didn’t like to talk much to his wife, to his sons, to his grandchildren;

whole books, as its chapters are called, are dedicated to the son’s journeys before we even meet his father); and it ends not with the triumphant reunion of the hero and his wife, but with a tearstained reunion between him and his father, by now an old and broken man. As much as it is a tale of husbands and wives, then, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—about fathers and sons. — And knew the minds of many men. From Miami we flew home to New York. It was night. As we settled into our seats, the stewardess mentioned that there was “bad weather” waiting at home. Daddy briefly looked up from the book that he was reading, registered the information, and then went back to the book. Soon after we were in the air, however, the pilot announced that, because of the weather, there would be a lengthy delay before we could land; we would have to “circle.” The plane started to bank gently, and for a long time we went round and round. Up where we were, there was no weather at all: the night was as dense and matte as the piece of velvet a jeweler might use to display his stones—like the jeweler from whom, my mother once whispered to me, her own father had bought her engagement ring, haggling in a narrow back room on Forty-Seventh Street with an old Jewish man, one of Grandpa’s many, many friends, who rolled some uncut brilliants onto the black cloth as he and my grandfather argued in Yiddish, all because my father didn’t have enough money to buy the kind of stone her father tho...