Book Review: Houses of Detention by Jean Ende

I received an advance readers copy of this book via the publisher and NetGalley. All opinions are my own. Available for sale now.

I don’t know if this is a book I would have picked off the shelf on my own but when the publisher reached out to me the premise sounded interesting enough that I said yes and got to reading. So let’s start with what I enjoyed about Houses of Detention.

I thought the setting and premise was really interesting and something I hadn’t seen a lot of in fiction. The Rosens are a Jewish family who arrived in the Bronx in New York after World War Two. We have the matriarch, Golda, or bubbe, her two sons Saul and Morris and daughter Elaine. A second daughter was lost with her family during the war. Saul and Morris have married American-Jewish wives, Helen and Rachel, and become successful New York business owners. They are practising Jews, immersed in Jewish-American culture, but not particularly conservative. Elaine meanwhile marries Harvey, a much more religious Jewish man who has had a more traumatic history in his journey from Europe to North America. Harvey once hoped to be a scholar but has given up his dreams for the financial stability working with his brothers-in-law provides. The Rosens are close, living on the same street and raising their children together.

When Elaine becomes ill, Helen and Rachel step up to help her children, Rebecca and Marvin. After Elaine’s death, Rebecca and Marvin are practically raised by their aunts as Harvey is consumed with grief. Harvey turns to study and religion, something neither his in-laws or his children can really understand. Tensions between conservative religious Harvey and his increasingly-Americanized children increase while their aunts and uncles seek a way to stay involved. Rebecca increasingly acts out, getting into trouble with police, and is eventually sent away to a strict reform school. Marvin tries to fly under his father’s radar, focusing on playing baseball with his cousins.

The Jewish diaspora in America after World War Two is not one I’ve read extensively about and I found it very interesting. We have a generation of adults dealing with trauma but at very different levels. Some, like Helen, grew up largely in America and so are more distanced from the atrocities of war. The Rosens are closer to it and we see the grief that the loss of their sister and daughter has created and the way that is triggered again after Elaine dies. And then we see a character like Harvey who has left everything behind, including the man he once hoped himself to be. These are the adults raising a generation born after the war, on the other side of the world. There’s a divide between these generations that can never quite be bridged and Ende does an excellent job of depicting this.

Where the book faltered for me was in how it tells this story. The novel covers a lot of timeline and at various points it felt like it had pulled out too far and I needed a tighter frame. We have several characters and it’s not always clear who is really the protagonist. Even more so, a lot of the action is simply told to the reader rather than letting it unfold on the page. Later in the book, a new character is introduced, a great source of tension amongst the Rosens. When we’re still waiting to see how these relationships are going to play out, a new chapter begins and we’re told that four years have passed and that character is now dead. These moments made me feel like I was absent from the actual action and made it harder to really feel emotionally invested in the story. In a similar vein, a lot of the dialogue felt like too much exposition and not the way real people would talk to each other, particularly amongst family.

I think much of this is the growing pains of a first novel and so I’ll be interested to see the topics that Ende explores next.