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Through a Portagee Gate
Through a Portagee Gate is both an autobiography and a biography. It gives a remarkably honest self-portrait and an endearing tribute to the author's father, a Portuguese immigrant cobbler who came to America in 1915. The narrative reveals a deep desire to escape the confines of the immigrant, ethnic world, while also acknowledging a keen nostalgia about one's past, a need to remember and recognize those who came before. Felix accomplishes this through unforgettable dialogue and vivid characterizations worthy of Steinbeck―a prose sometimes poignant, at other times hilarious that strips human experience to its bare and powerful elements.
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First published November 30, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 7, 2022
An ode to a Portuguese father who embodies the immigrant experience of many from places around the globe searching for a better life in America.
November 14, 2016
My grandparents and great-grandparents were part of a mass immigration to the U.S. from the Azores. This book focuses on a New Bedford family, and local life from 1900 through the sixties.
New Bedford has a history that is lately familiar, with good jobs going south first, then to China. Telling the story of this transformation through the eyes of a shoe cobbler and his family is a time-word devise, but Reis is a good writer. This book is 482 pages of subtle observations about the interactions of neighbors, the evolution of neighborhoods, the effects of unions and politics on people whose only goal is to survive and see their children do better than they did.
I bought the book in 2006 while visiting a bookstore in New Bedford with an Aunt of mine, and could never get started with it. "Who really wants to read about a shoe cobbler for 482 pages?", I kept thinking.
Picking it up recently I noticed that it started the with interesting quotes from an 1893 article by the then-President of M.I.T. Frances Walker, who decried the arrival of these immigrants saying that these unbridled immigrations would bring "every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, from Ireland to the Ural Mountains (to be) completely drained off into the United States" and that it would continue as long as the "broken, the corrupt, the abject" think they could do better here. He might have added that he assumed some were good people.
Here is another quote from the many articles and books he wrote at the time:
"The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."
All of this got my attention in 2016 for obvious reasons, and so over three days I could not put this book down and could not stop thinking about my grandparents and their friends going through what this family went through, to give their kids - our parents - the better life that we indeed had. Reis is a good writer, and you are immersed in his father's world for 480 pages, and come away with enormous empathy for the people from the Azores and Cape Verdean who immigrated to Bristol County, Massachusetts. My admiration for my Grandfather and Great-grandfather knows no bounds after reading this book.
5 stars.
New Bedford has a history that is lately familiar, with good jobs going south first, then to China. Telling the story of this transformation through the eyes of a shoe cobbler and his family is a time-word devise, but Reis is a good writer. This book is 482 pages of subtle observations about the interactions of neighbors, the evolution of neighborhoods, the effects of unions and politics on people whose only goal is to survive and see their children do better than they did.
I bought the book in 2006 while visiting a bookstore in New Bedford with an Aunt of mine, and could never get started with it. "Who really wants to read about a shoe cobbler for 482 pages?", I kept thinking.
Picking it up recently I noticed that it started the with interesting quotes from an 1893 article by the then-President of M.I.T. Frances Walker, who decried the arrival of these immigrants saying that these unbridled immigrations would bring "every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, from Ireland to the Ural Mountains (to be) completely drained off into the United States" and that it would continue as long as the "broken, the corrupt, the abject" think they could do better here. He might have added that he assumed some were good people.
Here is another quote from the many articles and books he wrote at the time:
"The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."
All of this got my attention in 2016 for obvious reasons, and so over three days I could not put this book down and could not stop thinking about my grandparents and their friends going through what this family went through, to give their kids - our parents - the better life that we indeed had. Reis is a good writer, and you are immersed in his father's world for 480 pages, and come away with enormous empathy for the people from the Azores and Cape Verdean who immigrated to Bristol County, Massachusetts. My admiration for my Grandfather and Great-grandfather knows no bounds after reading this book.
5 stars.
June 25, 2016
Didn't enjoy it. A very ambivalent relationship with his family, author seems to have internalized the prejudice and denigration directed toward the Portuguese in America.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews