(Through a Portagee Gate is both an autobiography and a bi...)
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. Charles Reis 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.
(Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is the stor...)
Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 is the story of an election for mayor in a Massachusetts mill town in 1934 as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old Portuguese boy, Seraphin.
(Tony: A New England Boyhood is an autobiographical novel ...)
Tony: A New England Boyhood is an autobiographical novel about growing up in Gaw (New Bedford), Massachusetts in the 1930s. Charles Reis Felix presents a rounded-out picture of Tony. You see Tony at home with his mother. You see him with the gang on the street. You see him at school. You see him looking for work in the last chapter. But most of all you see him with his best friend Lommy as they explore the city, doing things that require no money: watching a baseball game, watching girls bowl at the bowling alley, watching girls sunbathe at Lindamar Beach, watching the vaudeville acts on a Saturday night from the doorway of Cozy's Café, watching the hula-hula dancers and "the only living her-MAW-phro-dite in the world" gives short demonstrations at the carnival.
Charles Reis Felix was a United States teacher, writer, author, who also participated in World War II. He wrote books, based on his war years, as well as his teaching experience and Portuguese background of his family.
Background
Charles Reis Felix was born on April 29, 1923, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. He was one of four children of Portuguese immigrant parents. His father was a Portuguese immigrant from Setúbal, Portugal, who for many years ran a cobbler's shop in Coggeshall Square and then Weld Square. Felix's maternal grandfather set up a shoe repair shop at 1524 Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Education
Charles Reis Felix attended local public schools, including Phillips Avenue School, and graduated from New Bedford High School in 1941. He studied at the University of Michigan from 1941-1943, until he was drafted into the United States Army. After the war, in 1950 Felix received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford University in Palo Alto.
Charles Reis Felix was a young, raw recruit in the closing stages of World War II. After the war, he became an elementary school teacher. Felix wrote 9 major books, only 4 of which appeared in print, the first when the writer was already 79: Crossing the Sauer: A memoir of World War II (2002), Through a Portagee Gate (2004), Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934 (2005), and Tony: A New England Boyhood (2008).
In Crossing the Sauer: A Memoir of World War II, Felix tells of his part in the dramatic war days. In December of 1944, he was sent to the Western Front as an infantry replacement and soon found himself part of Patton's Third Army moving through France and on to victory in Germany. He later remarks that he and his fellow recruits soon realized that Patton's famous nickname "Blood and Guts" really meant "his guts, our blood." Through his memories and reconstructed conversations, Felix recounts life at the front and behind the lines in occupied France and Germany. Felix's observations take in petty and tyrannical noncoms, grandstanding and incompetent officers, and encounters, sometimes comic, sometimes violent, between the United States soldiers and French and German civilians.
The setting of Charles Felix's "Portuguese-American" books is New Bedford, Massachusetts, especially the area known as the North End, with the Depression and the post-World War II period being the temporal background of much of his writing. The latter, both generically and thematically, is experience-based. Through a Portuguese Gate is both an autobiography - mainly a teacher's story - and a biography of Charles's family but privileging his father. Da Gama, Cary Grant, and the Election of 1934, a very modern book in its loose structure, is in part a satire about the exploitation on the part of the established Portuguese-Americans of recent arrivals from Portugal. The novel also deals with Portuguese intergroup and interethnic rivalries. Set in the time of the Depression, it is a portrait of the multiethnic inner-city United States. Of the three "Portuguese" books, Tony: A New England Boyhood is an extremely well crafted coming-of-age story, also set in the New Bedford of the Depression-era. Two characteristics stand out in both Felix's autobiography and novels: a masterful command of dialogue and brilliant deployment of storytelling, reminding the reader of the world of orality inhabited by many of Felix's characters, and for the Lusophone reader reminiscent of the Portuguese immigrants' ancestral homes and largely peasant culture.