Jacob Portman—Dennis Portman

Jacob Portman—Dennis Portman is a father-son relationship shaped by concern, mistrust, and the reverberations of Abraham Portman’s losses. As Jacob investigates his grandfather’s life and faces his own distress, he begins to see Dennis’s protectiveness and Abraham’s emotional absence not as isolated family traits, but as parts of a history that has passed between generations.

Family History and Inherited Distance

Abraham was the only member of his family to escape Poland before the Second World War. Sent to Britain at twelve with a suitcase and the clothes he wore, he never saw his parents, siblings, or extended family again; they were killed before he turned sixteen. The loss left him with an experience of family rupture that Jacob later recognizes as relevant to his father’s childhood as well as his own.

Abraham’s accounts of his childhood recast the children’s home as a safe, enchanted refuge. The story concealed the truth of persecution and wartime survival: the children had been hunted for being Jewish, and escape itself was extraordinary. Jacob eventually stopped asking Abraham for stories, ashamed of having envied the life they described and unwilling to pry into what his grandfather had endured. That silence preserved Abraham’s secrets, but it also left the next generation to make sense of his distance without knowing its causes.

Dennis and Abraham

Dennis describes his father as a man who did not know how to be a parent but felt he had to take on the role because none of his siblings had survived the war. In Dennis’s account, Abraham responded by being away on hunting trips and business trips; even when physically present, he could seem absent. The explanation makes Dennis’s childhood less a story of simple rejection than one shaped by Abraham’s bereavement and difficulty inhabiting family life.

Jacob later proposes that Abraham had already lost a family twice: first in Poland, then again in the adopted family he formed after arriving in Britain. He wonders whether that history could explain Abraham’s distance from Dennis and his own sister, Aunt Susie. He also raises the possibility that Abraham’s secrecy should change how Dennis interprets his father’s conduct toward Dennis’s mother. The exchange does not settle that question, but it marks a shift: Jacob is trying to understand Abraham through the losses he survived rather than judging him only by the ways he failed to be present.

Care, Conflict, and Breathing Room

In Wales, Dennis monitors Jacob’s wellbeing and worries that spending his days alone in the old house is not helping him. He invokes the advice of Jacob’s psychiatrist, Dr. Golan, and argues that the trip is meant to be therapeutic. Jacob pushes back sharply against the feeling that Dr. Golan’s guidance governs every part of his life. Dennis responds by insisting that Jacob go birding with him the next day; after Jacob refuses, Dennis leaves for the pub.

The conflict eases when Dr. Golan speaks to Jacob by phone and tells him that Dennis should give him room to sort things out for himself. Jacob hears that the psychiatrist, whom he has just mocked, has again defended his need for independence. He later approaches Dennis about the next day, and Dennis relents: Jacob may do what he wants. The adjustment is modest, but it shows care becoming less controlling when Dennis is asked to make space for his son.

Honesty and Fragile Trust

After Jacob lies about meeting friends, he admits to Dennis that there are no other children on the island and that he invented the story to keep his father from worrying about him being alone. Dennis says he worries even when Jacob’s doctor advises otherwise. His response makes clear that concern is not merely an argument Jacob can dismiss; it is one of the ways Dennis tries to protect him.

Dennis initially remains unsure what to believe. Jacob presents the invented friends as preferable to being thought a sheep killer, and Dennis pauses before washing his face at the sink. When he turns back, he appears to have decided that trusting his son is less trouble than continuing to question him. He still asks whether they should call Dr. Golan, but Jacob says he is okay. The scene leaves trust neither complete nor absent: Jacob has acknowledged a lie, and Dennis chooses, provisionally, to accept his reassurance.

A History That Reaches Jacob

Jacob’s understanding of his family becomes more painful as he recognizes how far Abraham’s history reaches. In a moment of intense crying, he thinks of his great-grandparents’ deaths, the children killed in the home, Abraham’s family being taken from him, and the way Dennis grew up feeling he had no father. He experiences these events as a decades-old hurt passed down to him, even though the original losses belong to an earlier generation.

Later, Miss Peregrine explains that Abraham knew Jacob shared his unusual nature but may have kept the truth from him to protect him. Abraham had faced persecution both as a Jew and as one of the peculiar people, and he was tormented by the thought that he was sheltered while others were being killed. That account deepens the family relationship beyond ordinary reticence: Abraham’s silence is connected to a history of danger and divided belonging, while Jacob’s new knowledge makes his father’s and grandfather’s distances newly legible. By the time Jacob longs for life to return to how it was before he found Miss Peregrine’s letter, that earlier version of the family no longer feels recoverable; he cannot imagine clearly either the life before or what comes next.