Retracing the Odyssey as Father and Son

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Daniel Mendelssohn is a widely acclaimed author, critic, and essayist, and he has a PhD in classics and teaches literature at Bard College in upstate New York.

In 2001, he taught an undergraduate seminar on the great Greek epic The Odyssey, but this one had an unusual twist because sitting in on the class along with the young students was the professor’s eighty one year old father, Jay Mendelssohn.

Daniel Mendelssohn tells the story of that semester and more in a moving book called An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

His dad had been a kid from the Bronx who stubbornly worked his way up to become a research scientist and mathematician.

He was this gruff absolutist who reveled in the precision of numbers.

And he was somebody who always said, if something’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.

So the book is this delightful chronicle of contrast because there’s the dapper urbane younger Mendelssohn who lives in the world of text and interpretation where meanings shift and multiply, and then there’s his schlubby, opinionated dad who keeps interrupting with his own commentary, like demanding to know why everyone thinks Odysseus is such a hero.

He says, he cheats on his wife, he sleeps with Calypso, he loses all of his men, so he’s a lousy general.

The younger Mendelson finds these interruptions embarrassing and frustrating, but the students love the old guy and his insights.

So on one level, the book feels like taking this invigorating college class on the Odyssey, all for free.

After the class, the father and son take a tour of the Aegean, retracing the voyage of Odysseus.

So it becomes a book about travel writing too.

And one of the other things I really enjoyed about this book is the passion that the younger Mendelssohn, the professor brings to teaching.

He writes Beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching, for the best teacher is one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure to So that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him.

In this way, because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death, good teaching is like good parenting.

You know, there there’s so many lines in this book, Grant, where you just sort of like have to stop and put the book down to think about it.

I love the merging of those concepts.

The relationship between father and son.

Yes.

The relationship between practicality and literature analysis, the relationship between the eras, the two different eras of the son is it’s very different than his father’s era.

Right, right.

And of course it’s it echoes the whole story in the Odyssey, you know, Odysseus and his son Telemachus and his dad and and yeah, it’s about fathers and sons and education and and travel and and so much more.

It’s it’s a richly moving book.

So the book by Daniel Mendelssohn is called It’s called An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic.

We’ll link to Daniel Mendelssohn’s book on our website at waywordradio.org.

And Martha and I are always delighted to hear what you’re reading.

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