Jean Ende is a New York based novelist and short story writer. Her work explores family life combining humor, regret and nostalia, past and future fears and aspirations.

Her debut novel, Houses of Detention, published by Apprentice House Press in April, 2025 — is a heartfelt and hilarious tale of the immigrant experience and clashing generations.

What’s a nice girl from a good family doing in a place like the Bronx House of Juvenile Detention? Like all immigrants who flee persecution, when the Rosen family escaped the Nazis they hoped life in America would be perfect. And for a while it seemed like their immigrant dreams would come true. The men operated successful businesses , families lived in comfortable homes with a mink stole in every hall closet, the women provided abundant helpings of high-carb food and sage advice and grandma preserved old world memories and finished a bottle of whiskey every week.

But, of course, the streets weren’t actually paved with gold. American-born teenager, Rebecca, pushed boundaries so far that the family story suddenly included the police and the juvenile justice system; her father, a formerly revered Talmudic scholar mourned the status he lost when he was driven from his pious society to this money-grubbing country and a woman with stricter religious beliefs married into the family causing near-catastrophic rifts in a group that appeared uniform to outsiders.

Despite the ever present shadow of the Holocaust, there’s frequent humor. People who eat frozen, pre-packaged bagels are condemned; Cossacks with fiery swords, once known for burning Jewish villages, are now Bar Mitzvah waiters carrying flaming desserts; the shiksa chippie dating the synagogue vice-president has a poodle-shaped purse that barks in French and no one understands how WASPs can comfortably wear leather loafers without socks.

This multi-generational book will appeal to everyone, Jew or gentile, immigrant or Mayflower descendant.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“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 insider view of 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 and her most recent book, White Flag

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