Faithful Friends-1
Faithful Friend of the 15th Codfish Supper
Eulália
Mendes, the Faithful Friend of the 15th Codfish Supper, January 21,
2002, Riviera Restaurant, East Providence, Rhode Island, U. S. A.
Presented by our
Compadre Manuel Luciano da Silva
On
the series of our selection of the Faithful
Friends, we have had
only one woman, Emma
Lazarus, the poetess who wrote the sonnet that is on the pedestal of the Statue
of Liberty in New York City. She was, you recall, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew.
She was the niece of Supreme Court Judge, Benjamin Cardozo, also a Sephardic
Portuguese Jew, and still considered the best Supreme American Court Judge.
We
also know that the Levy family, Portuguese
Jews, owned the Monticello
for 87 years and saved it from
destruction, the
famous house built by
President Thomas Jefferson. (This discovery was made by our Compadre Humberto
Carreiro).
But
we also have in American History a
bad Sephardic Portuguese Jew: John
Wilkes Booth, one of the best-known actors of the day, assassinated President
Lincoln, on April 14, 1865.
Today
we would like to dedicate our
Faithful Friend to another Portuguese-American woman:
Eulália Mendes, born in 1910, in
Gouveia, Beira Alta, Continental Portugal. She came to New Bedford at the age of
5, with her mother and brothers to
live with her father, but because the
father had difficulty in feeding
the family they returned to
Portugal. But few years later the family returned to U. S.
She went to school in New Bedford, and later became an employee in one of the textile factories in that Whaling City. Because she was full of energy she became a leader in the great strikes against the owners of 73 textiles factories in Fall River. She became a true heroine of the strikers. But they lost the strike and the factories closed. The Great Depression started in U. S. A. In the mean while she had married a Portuguese American immigrant Joseph Figueiredo from Boston who was a member of the Communist Party . After this she never had peace, because the American Immigration Services and later the investigation conducted by Senator McCarthy gathered enough evidence for her to be deported. She did not want to be deported to Portugal because Salazar regime would send her to Tarrafal, in Cape Verde Islands. So she was deported to Warsaw, Poland, with a bunch of other members of the Communist Party.
She was 43 years old when she arrived in Poland. The Communist Polish government gave her a job in their International Radio short wave reporting to north America because she spoke English well. She did not know Polish, and even forgot her Portuguese.
She
always loved America very much. She wanted to join the American Armed Forces,
but was always refused this
opportunity.
She
has been described as a
heroine in several documentaries in the Portuguese National Television.
The recent Portuguese Government has offered
her to return to Portugal but she has refused because of her advanced
age. She is now 92 years old and
lives in a Nursing Home in Warsaw, Poland.
She
wanted to visit some of her family members in U. S. A.,
but the American Immigration Services has always refused.
Her
name Mendes
is a
typical name of Portuguese
Sephardic Jew. Gouveia today and
the region around it has still several remnants
of Portuguese Sephardic Jews. If Eulália and her family had stayed in the
mountains of Serra da Estrela in
the North of Portugal, she certainly would not have been caught in the net of
the dramatic life of being
an immigrant.
It is very painful to be an immigrant. Now the people in Portugal emigrate in very small numbers because the standing of living there has increased very much. That is good. Portugal is not exporting anymore Eulálias. That is also very good.
If you ever visit the North of Portugal go to Trancoso and Belmonte where you still find Portuguese synagogues and several inhabitants who still say their Jewish prayers. They do not understand the words—I asked them personally -- but they continue to be faithful to their Jewish faith.