“Houses of Detention explores with uncanny wisdom, humor and compassion the travails of one large Jewish immigrant family’s attempts at finding its place in American society. The shadow of the Old World and War hang over the characters psyches, whether they were born in the United States or in their small, segregated village in “bloodlands” between Russia and Germany. Jean Ende gives us a compelling inside view into this chaotic and loving family, the elders wanting nothing more than to leave a legacy of stability and success for their children. A fabulous read that illuminates the issues all immigrants from disparate countries and backgrounds face.” — Kaylie Jones, author of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries and Lies My Mother Never Told Me

“To read Jean Ende’s remarkable debut novel is to pull up a seat to a dining room table in the Bronx of the mid-20th century, a table packed with colorful characters and their plentiful gossip. Beneath all that kibitzing, however, is the real story: the essential and often heartrending tale of one family of Jewish immigrants searching for a new American life in the shadow of genocide and exodus.” — Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting and Oliver Loving “

Jean Ende’s Houses of Detention takes us deep into a historical American Jewish experience and a family working through the generational trauma of the Holocaust. Maybe they could be called typical, but every family’s tsuris is complicated. Ende has portrayed the lives of this family in a raw and unvarnished way, bringing a rare truth to this engrossing novel.” — Judy L. Mandel, New York Times bestselling author of Replacement Child – a memoir, and her most recent book, White Flag

“Jean Ende weaves love and bitterness and confusion and compassion into a saga with characters so rich you’ll wake up thinking about them.” — Julie Maloney, author of Matter of Chance and director of Women Reading Aloud