The Children’s House

The Children's House

The Children’s House, by Alice Nelson
Vintage Australia, 2018. 304 pages.

The Children’s House is a sweeping story across multiple countries, cultures and generations. It is a novel that questions what it means to be family, and especially the relationship between mothers and their children.

Nelson weaves themes of motherhood and trauma through the novel in powerful ways. How can you heal from the wounds inflicted by a wounded mother? Is it possible to love after trauma? How do you understand a mother who never let you into her history or her heart? 

Summary

Marina is a writer who lived the first years of her life in a Children’s House in a Jewish Kibbutz with her brother. After the death of their father, their mother took Marina and her brother to New York. In the Kibbutz, the children belonged to the community, not their parents. Marina recalls her brother escaping his dorm room in the Children’s House and sneaking into his parent’s house in the dead of night. Marina and her brother grow up desperate for their mother’s love, but she is either unable or unwilling to show them any kind of affection or attachment. 

Marina meets Jacob later in life. A divorced psychologist, Jacob was also born on a kibbutz, the son of idealistic Jews who fled when Jacob was born, unable to give him up to the Children’s House. Jacob and Marina are an unexpected joy and comfort to each other. Marina, Jacob, Jacob’s mother Rose and his son Ben make a family for one another and provide solidity where many of them had felt only absence. 

Constance is a young refugee, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. She has a toddler son, named Gabriel by a pastor in a refugee camp. The name she gave him, Utabazi’, means ‘he belongs to them’. 

Marina and Constance live in the same neighbourhood in Harlem, Marina in a beautiful brownstone, (formerly owned by nuns, until the nuns got too old and moved away) and Constance and Gabriel in the projects. They meet, connected only by Constance’s material need, and by Marina’s sudden and unreasoned love for Gabriel. 

Despite Jacob’s concerns, Marina becomes deeply invested in Gabriel. She helps Constance navigate the underfunded bureaucracy of government services, takes them to doctor’s appointments and looks after Gabriel while Constance attends classes. 

The narrative is interwoven with memories from Marina’s childhood, stories of Jacob’s divorce, his parents’ departure to the Holy Land to build a new Israel and their subsequent flight back to New York when Jacob was born. 

Alice Nelson

Themes

The Children’s House is a story of parallel but contrasted mothers. Jacob’s first wife, Leni, had an affair and abandoned Jacob and their son Ben when he was two years old. 

“In the days after she left, Ben asked for her again and again. The longer Leni was gone the more he wanted to see her, waking up in the night sobbing, trailing around the apartment, peering into every room as if she might suddenly materialise” (pp.78-79). 

Leni did not come back for three years. 

A young man when The Children’s House takes place, Ben is quiet, with a deep sadness running through him. “Ben had seemed unscathed and yet he was not. Like some dormant tropical disease, his grief over his mother’s betrayal had flared up again” (p. 80).

Marina’s mother Gizela never really saw her children as her own. For the first 9 years of motherhood, Gizela’s children belonged to the Children’s House. When he was a little boy, Marina’s brother Dov would sneak out of his dorm and into his parent’s home. When their father died, Gizela brought Marina and Dov to New York. They loved her desperately and tried endlessly to win their mother’s affection. But Gizela remained interminably distant, physically unavailable and often surprised to see them, as if she had forgotten she had children. 

Marina and Dov grew up shaped by their mother’s distance. At college, Dov’s major art project was a confronting portrayal of children’s houses in the Jewish Kibbutzim, interspersed with scenes from a documentary of adults who had grown up in a children’s house. All of them were wounded. One man said, “They called us children of the Gods, but really we were small offerings to the Gods of ideology” (p. 279). The project is complete with a portrait of Gizela, huge and distant, arms crossed, unavailable. 

The day after his exhibition, Dov kills himself and Gizela disappears forever. Marina remains, haunted by her beloved brother’s death and her mother’s absence.  

It is clear that Constance has suffered deep trauma. The details are never specified, although it is implied that Gabriel was conceived through rape, and rape as an intentional act of terror. Marina researches the atrocities committed in the Rwandan genocide, but the readers and Marina are together left to wonder what exactly happened to Constance. What is certain is that Constance feels no special affection for her son. Whatever horrors she experienced have left her with thick walls around her soul, with no capacity to express love to her son. Gabriel is serious, filled with a furious grief, a “pure, raging sorrow” that fails to evoke any more than annoyance in his mother. 

Rose is Jacob’s mother. She stands as a clear contrast to Leni, Gizela and Constance, unfailing in her love for her children. Rose and her husband Max met during World War Two, and when the state of Israel was declared, they left New York for a kibbutz in northern Israel, joining in the grand Zionist project. When Rose was pregnant with Jacob she had been convinced that she could give him up the Children’s House, that it was for the good of Israel. But when he was born, she knew it was impossible. They fled, Rose terrified that they would take her child from her. Their return to New York felt like a failure, and it was difficult for many years. But Rose and Max raised Jacob and his sister with love and presence. Long after Max’s death, Rose continues to host the Shabbat dinner every Friday evening, giving Jacob, Marina and Ben a place to belong and to be family.

These four women provide context for the way Marina is drawn towards Gabriel. She wants desperately to be a mother, and Gabriel’s obvious deep need for maternal love maps onto her own insistent need to love him.

The Children’s House reads non-chronologically, in a way that circles back on itself, so that the reader knows part of what is coming, but doesn’t have the full context to understand it until later in the book. So spoilers are more emotional spoilers than plot spoilers. Be duly warned. 

The book starts and ends with Constance leaving. Constance and Gabriel join Marina and her family for Christmas at a house at Cape Cod. Early one morning, Constance disappears, never to be seen again by her son. What Gabriel and Marina don’t know is that Constance did not die in a storm on the Cape as believed, but rather got on a bus to Upstate New York, and went to live with the nuns who were the previous owners of Marina and Jacob’s brownstone.  

For Gabriel, the ‘after’ is told in a single chapter. He grows up with Marina as his mother, with almost nothing to remember Constance by. He wonders about Constance and describes himself as shaped by her absence, but there is no description of remnant trauma. He doesn’t mention going to therapy, he has no memories of the four years of neglect and distance he suffered. 

“I don’t have any memories of her, but she’s in me like a door banging a little in the wind. Or perhaps I just think she’s there because she should be there. A mother should be there” (pp. 289-290, emphasis added).

I am hesitant to say that the ending feels too easy. This book is masterful. It is complex and layered and made me think and wonder and learn. Overall, Nelson’s depictions of traumatised mothers and the traumas they inflict on their children felt deeply real and worthy of attention. One of the key messages of The Children’s House is that children need their mothers’ love and presence. Another is that trauma leaves deep and lasting wounds, which are not easily overcome. Both of these messages seem undercut by the endings given to Constance and Gabriel. They both seem to end up being kind of… fine? 

Constance’s life with the nuns is marked by quiet work, caring for the old and dying sisters, learning the names of the birds in upstate New York, tending a vegetable garden. She seems better, away from her son. She finds some level of peace and purpose in caring for the nuns, where she could not find peace or purpose in caring for her son. 

Constance and Gabriel, and Marina for that matter, find healing in the love of other people. 

The Children’s House is not a light story, but it is a hopeful one. It shows that the human need for love is a desperate one, answered only by the human need to love.

At least in this book.

For me, The Children’s House left me questioning the sufficiency of human love, and pondering the need for something greater. 

The trauma experienced by Constance and Gabriel feels too great to merely evaporate with time and distance. I approached the end of the book feeling that healing for Constance and Gabriel would be a result of miraculous love, and as well as years of therapy.

The Children’s House made me reflect on the beautiful Old Testament passages that show God’s heart for the orphan, the foreigner and those who mourn:

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
    the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the foreigner
    and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
Psalm 146:8b-9a


The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
     and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
    instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
    instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
    instead of a spirit of despair.
Isaiah 61:1-3a

God is close to the powerless, the orphan, the exile and the refugee. 

In our lives, when we meet those like Gabriel and Constance, we can trust that Jesus sees for them and cares for them

—Reviewed by Ellanda Joyce

LLB

Ellanda Joyce studied politics, English and sociology at uni, and wrote an honours thesis on Christian responses to cultural shifts in Australia. Now she reads and writes about spirituality, politics and faith, as well as reading a good dose of fiction. Ellanda is the assistant manager at The Wandering Bookseller, which involves lots of logistics planning, marketing and listening to Karl deliver unsolicited lectures on church history and comparative theology.

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