Earlier this week I started reading "Home is an Island" by Alfred Lewis (Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth: 2012) which was published last month. Alfred was born in Flores (1902) and became prominant in California where he died in 1977. The book is an atobiographical novel and it is an absolute must read especially for 3rd and 4th generation Azorean Americans who are trying to understand why people in a tiny island would leave everything and everybody they ever knew and loved and sail off on whaling ships for the great and vast unknown, possibly never to return. Some did return many years later, loaded with treasure, becoming celebrities in their village; others returned quietly with empty pockets, pitied by someand ridiculed by others. Some died at sea, some just disappeared; others just never saw the familes left back on the island again. Their great grandchildren in America are trying to discover who "Frank Marshall" of the Wester Islands was before he became "assimilated and acculturated" into the melting pot and married their great-grandmother Mamie Murphy in California. Lewis's novel is lyrical and has a beautiful poetry like feeling about it. Another great read, along the same lines is "Dark Stones" by Dias de Melo (from Pico) published by Gavea Brown:1988
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