HOUSES OF DETENTION

A family of Jewish immigrants struggles with the strict social and religious mores of 1950s America in Ende’s novel.

The Rosen family resides in their improvised 20th-century shtetl in New York City, a sort of mini-village in which all the members of the extended family live within shouting distance of one another. The family is organized around three sisters—Elaine, Rachel, and Helen—all of whom have young children who are close cousins. Though the family is secure, Elaine is terminally ill, and not long into the story she dies, leaving her daughter, Rebecca, and her son, Marvin, in the care of their pious, overly strict father, Harvey. Racked with grief and traumatized by a nightmarish childhood lived in the murderous shadow of the Nazis, Harvey is ill-equipped to raise the children on his own. The summer Rebecca is 14 years old, the entire family (minus Harvey and the other men, except for weekends) spends the season together at a house in Atlantic City, New Jersey. There, Rebecca—physically mature for her age and newly rebellious—is caught in a compromising position with a young man. Afraid of Harvey’s wrath, the aunts conspire to downplay the incident, but Harvey sees right through their efforts, and Rebecca and Marvin are left to absorb his rage and grief, which sets the stage for Rebecca’s eventual flight and “descent” into a sort of promiscuity deemed unacceptable by her conservative father and society. Ende’s novel is expertly crafted from the start—readers will quickly feel immersed in the small (yet also vast and complex) world in which the Rosens operate. The passages describing midcentury New York and Atlantic City ring with the lived experience of teenage years spent on the boardwalk: “The moving spotlight on top of the Ocean Avenue Wonder Wheel traced a path from the roof of the arcade to its base, briefly illuminating the wall against which Sal and Rebecca had decided to take their romance to the next level.” Drawn with no small measure of compassion, the realistically flawed members of the Rosen family are sure to stick with readers long after the last page.

A strong debut that feels timely despite looking back at a bygone era.