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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

The first adjective used to describe the man with whom the proem begins—the first modifier in the entire Odyssey—is a peculiar Greek word, polytropos. The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many,” and a tropos is a “turning.” English words containing the element -trope are derived, ultimately, from tropos. “Heliotrope,” for instance, is a flower that turns toward the sun. “Apotropaic,” to take a less cheery example, is an adjective that means “turning away evil”: it is used of superstitious rites that are intended to avert bad luck—such as the custom, common among Eastern European Jews of my grandparents’ era, of tying a red ribbon around the wrist of an infant in order to keep the Evil Eye away. Oh, my mother loved you so much, my mother will occasionally say to me, even now, when she took you to the park she would tie a red ribbon around your wrist! And then she’ll cluck her tongue sadly, tskkk, and sigh. The anecdote, I am aware, is not just about my grandmother’s great devotion to me: her deep emotion in this story is meant to stand in contrast to the relative lack of interest in me shown by my father’s parents, who didn’t meet me until I was two years old as the result of one of the grim silences that occasionally arose between my father and his brothers and his parents.