Abraham Portman and Frank Portman

Abraham Portman and Frank Portman’s relationship is marked by a painful mismatch: Abraham’s history helps explain his emotional withdrawal, but it does not erase Frank’s experience of growing up without a reliably present father. The truth emerges only after Abraham’s death, through Frank’s memories and Jacob’s effort to connect family silence with the losses that preceded it. Their relationship becomes a central link in the novel’s account of trauma passing from one generation to the next.

Identity and Background

Abraham was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War. At twelve, he was sent to Britain alone, with a suitcase and the clothes he wore; his parents, brothers, cousins, aunts, and uncles did not survive. As an adult, he carried the consequences of losing his family into his own role as a father. Frank later understood that Abraham may not have known how to parent, yet felt obliged to do so because none of his siblings had survived the war.

The story Frank eventually hears from Jacob places Abraham’s private losses in the broader history of persecution. Abraham had been born Jewish during the Nazi era and, as Miss Peregrine explains, faced the slaughter of both Jews and peculiars. His silence about painful experiences was not merely a gap in family knowledge: it reflected a past he had difficulty making available to those closest to him. The account does not establish that Frank knew these details while growing up; instead, it shows how much of Abraham’s history remained undisclosed until after his death.

Frank’s Childhood and Abraham’s Absence

Frank remembered Abraham as frequently away on hunting trips, business trips, and other travels. Even when Abraham was home, Frank recalled, he could seem emotionally absent. Frank described this pattern to Jacob as something extending beyond any single incident, though one childhood memory had become a family legend.

On Halloween, when Frank was four or five, he waited in a pink bunny costume for Abraham to take him trick-or-treating. Abraham had promised to come after work, but Frank sat by the driveway from five o’clock until nightfall and his father never arrived. Frank’s mother photographed him crying in the street so she could show Abraham what his absence had meant. The picture became a source of embarrassment for Frank and a lasting emblem of a promise unmet; in his account, it gave concrete form to a broader pattern of distance.

Secrets and the Family’s Suspicion

Frank and his aunt suspected that Abraham’s frequent travel might conceal another relationship. Frank told Jacob that they had found a letter from an unknown woman addressed to Abraham, with expressions of love and longing. They tore it up and flushed it away, and Frank said they never found another. The letter therefore remains evidence of the family’s suspicion, not proof of what Abraham’s travels involved.

Frank’s recollection also reveals how little he felt able to ask his father directly. He admitted that he had never probed the reasons for Abraham’s absences because he was afraid of what he might learn. He distinguished that fear from respect for Abraham’s war-related secrets, which he believed were painful and deserved to remain private. The result was an unresolved interpretation of Abraham’s conduct: the family had a suggestive letter and years of absence, but no settled explanation.

A Belated Reinterpretation

After Jacob learns more about Abraham, he tells Frank that Abraham may have been distant because he had already lost his family twice: first in Poland, then again through the family he formed after the war. Jacob proposes that Abraham’s earlier bereavements made it difficult to risk attachment to Frank and his sister, Aunt Susie. He also raises the possibility that Abraham’s travel did not mean he had been unfaithful to Frank’s mother.

Frank does not accept this explanation as a complete resolution. He says that things are rarely so simple, even while recognizing that the history may clarify why Abraham behaved as he did. He instead identifies another consequence of the family’s past: Jacob and Abraham had been unusually close. In Frank’s understanding, Abraham needed fifty years to overcome his fear of having a family, and Jacob arrived at a moment when his grandfather could form the bond that had eluded him earlier.

Intergenerational Consequences

Frank’s account shows the distinction between explaining emotional distance and undoing its effects. Abraham’s bereavement may have shaped his capacity for fatherhood, but Frank still remembers a father who was away and, when present, difficult to reach. Frank’s anger after hearing that Abraham had kept his history from him reflects the particular hurt of a son discovering that a central part of his father’s life remained hidden.

The relationship also forms one stage in a wider chain of inherited pain. Jacob connects Abraham’s losses to Frank’s childhood sense that he did not have a father, and then recognizes the burden reaching his own generation: he describes his distress as bound up with a decades-old hurt passed down through the family. The novel does not present these consequences as identical across generations. Abraham’s experiences, Frank’s estrangement, and Jacob’s later response differ, but the silences and attempted explanations link them. Their relationship matters because it makes that transmission visible without reducing either love or injury to a simple verdict.