Jacob Portman and Abe Portman

Jacob Portman and Abe Portman are connected by a family history that Jacob first mistakes for fantasy and later recognizes as a record of survival and loss. Their relationship is marked by Abe’s guardedness, the stories he told his grandson, and the intergenerational effects of the family he lost before Jacob was born.

Identity and Background

Abe was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War. At twelve, sent to Britain by his parents with a suitcase and the clothes he wore, he left on a one-way journey and never saw them or his older brothers, cousins, aunts, or uncles again. They were killed before his sixteenth birthday. His stories of monsters translated the horrors of persecution into a form a child could grasp; the apparently enchanted refuge of his childhood recast a children’s home and the children there as a safe haven. The story’s wonder concealed a history of persecution and escape.

Stories, Silence, and Misunderstanding

As a child, Jacob rejected Abe’s accounts as fabricated fairy tales. Abe accepted the rejection without arguing, and the subject fell away, leaving Jacob feeling deceived and unsure why his grandfather had encouraged him to believe in extraordinary possibilities. Jacob later understood that the tales were not simply lies but transformed versions of the truth. He stopped asking for them, while the details of Abe’s early life remained enclosed in mystery. Jacob felt ashamed of having envied his grandfather’s imagined adventures and believed Abe had a right to keep his painful history private.

The secrecy continued into Jacob’s adolescence. When Jacob learned that Abe’s stories had been true and that he himself was peculiar, he wondered why Abe had not told him plainly. Miss Peregrine suggested Abe had wanted to protect him: Abe had faced persecution both as a Jew and as a peculiar, and had been tormented by the knowledge that he was safe while others were being killed. Jacob also acknowledged that he had repeated his grandfather’s stories to a stranger, not knowing the people in them were real. The stories had connected the two generations, but their incomplete telling also helped expose Jacob and the children to danger.

A Family Pattern of Distance

Abe’s losses shaped his later role as a father. Jacob’s father explained that Abe seemed not to know how to be a parent, yet felt obliged to try because none of his siblings had survived the war. He responded by being away frequently on hunting and business trips; even when present, he could seem emotionally absent. Jacob later wondered whether Abe had lost his family twice: first in Poland, and then again when his adopted family began. He connected that history to Abe’s distance from his own son and considered whether it might explain his behavior better than the suspicion that Abe had been unfaithful to his wife.

The family’s grief reaches Jacob as well. In a moment of acute distress, he thinks of his great-grandparents’ deaths, the children killed in the bombing, Abe’s lost family, and the way his father had grown up feeling he lacked a father. He experiences these separate losses as a hurt passed down through generations, leaving him to confront the consequences of a history whose perpetrators are already dead. The connection is not a simple inheritance of memory: Jacob had first dismissed the stories, then had to understand how their silences and losses had shaped his family.

Recognition and Continuing Legacy

A photograph of Abe and Emma Bloom, taken shortly before Abe left for the war, gives Jacob a concrete trace of his grandfather’s earlier life. Emma’s attention is fixed on the young Abe, while he seems elsewhere; Jacob reads the image as both sad and beautiful, an expression of how little he knows about their relationship. The photograph makes the past present without resolving it, and Emma offers it as something Jacob’s father might recognize.

At the end of the book, Jacob leaves his parents, his town, and his once-best-and-only friend with the children. He understands that departure will not mean shedding his former life: the memory of those he leaves is tangible and heavy, and he will carry it with him. That recognition echoes his relationship with Abe. Jacob’s inheritance is not only the extraordinary truth behind his grandfather’s stories, but also the unresolved weight of family attachment and loss.