Episode 24: Mary Morris
On Hidden Histories and Jewish Identities
Mary Morris’s Five Books:
The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant
The Red House by Mary Morris
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Yehuda Kurtzer (host of Identity/Crisis), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
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Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
Thirty years ago, Laura’s mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, “I will not be here forever.” The family never understood what Viola meant.
Blending elements of true crime with settings that evoke Elena Ferrante, Laura follows her mother’s trajectory as she ventures north to Naples, Turin and finally home. Along the way, she confronts the dark truth of her mother’s story and at last makes sense of her own.
Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels The Jazz Palace, and Gateway to the Moon, and of nonfiction, including All the Way to the Tigers and the travel memoir classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in literature and the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Award for fiction. Morris lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In our conversation, we’ll explore the roots of the name, Mary, and how it has shaped her Jewish experience, what draws Morris to uncover buried histories in her work, and her unexpected and painful association with To Kill A Mockingbird.
Other Books Mentioned:
The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Transcript:
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Mary Morris about her new book, The Red House, a novel that unravels a family mystery involving a mother's disappearance and her hidden past as a Jew in wartime Southern Italy.
Mary Morris:
So in 2005 I was in the Memphis airport and something fell behind me, like I heard something drop, and I turned around and there was a button on the ground. And I looked at it and it was a picture of a woman's face and on it was written, have you seen this woman? And her name was Viola. And of course the mother in my novel is named Viola.
Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels The Jazz Palace and Gateway to the Moon, and of nonfiction, including All the Way to the Tigers and the travel memoir classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction. Morris lives in Brooklyn, New York. In this episode, we discuss how her name, Mary, affected how she relates to her Jewishness.
Let's just be straight here, my parents named me Mary so people wouldn't know I was Jewish by my name. Because I'm named Mary, I've had lots of antisemitic things said to me in my life.
We'll also discuss the pull to tell stories about buried histories.
Mary Morris:
It's a novel about the crypto-Jews of New Mexico. This was actually before they had been identified through DNA, but who believed they were Jewish. And we actually had a babysitter. We lived in New Mexico, and he worked for us briefly. And at one point when he found out we were a Jewish family, he asked me if we ate pork. And I said, no, we don't eat pork. And he said, my family doesn't eat pork either. He said, isn't that strange? And he said, you know, and my whole town doesn't eat pork. And I was like, that's really interesting.
All that and more coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Mary. I'm so happy to talk to you today. I have always admired your writing and your ability to weave the personal history into larger universal themes. And there's just a precision and a beauty to your writing. Every sentence feels so carefully crafted, pulls readers in. So I can't wait to get into the books that we're going to talk about today and to talk about The Red House.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Tali. I really appreciate it.
We're delighted. So before we dig in, you've written memoir and travel memoir, short stories, fiction. What compelled you to tell this particular story about The Red House?
Mary Morris:
I tend to say that this is the book I couldn't walk away from. You know, I do a lot of travel and travel writing and my husband and I, my family and I have done house swaps all over Europe really and other parts of the world. So we exchanged our house for others. And we did our final house swap, we decided not to do any more, but it was a farmhouse in Southern Italy. And long story short, I wound up in the town that is featured in The Red House and I found a plaque in the town in the churchyard that said to the people of this town from the people of Jerusalem for your help during the Nazi era, during the racist era. And that just kind of compelled me to find out more about the town. What kindness did the town show to the Jews at that period? So that's what compelled me to do it. And I just kind of started digging around. Then I found there's a physical Red House. I mean, it is a literal place. And I found that. It took some doing, but so that's what compelled me to do it.
And maybe if you could just tell everybody a short synopsis of The Red House.
Mary Morris:
Yes, there's a woman named Laura. She's 42 years old. When she was 12 years old, 30 years before, her mother disappeared in New Jersey and never returned, it shattered the family. She decides to go back to the town where she was born, which is Brindisi, Italy in Southern Italy, and try to find her mother's story because her mother never told her anything. Her mother said she was an orphan. Her father liked to joke that her mother was like a mushroom. She just grew up out of nowhere. But that actually isn't true. And Laura is on a search to discover. She's on a kind of emotional scavenger hunt to find out the mystery of her mother's disappearance. And that leads her down a very dark rabbit hole into World War II. The book is told in four stories. In a sense, I like people to think that each story is a story of the house itself. The physical Red House is also four stories, so.
That's so interesting. I read or saw somewhere that you also structured All the Way to the Tigers in the same way, like the shape of the tigers.
Yeah, I wanted it to be striped. I made it, I made stripes and I made it symmetrical. Yeah, I do that. It helps me, you know, it's sort of architecture, that every book has its own architecture in a way. So I do like to think that my father and my uncle were, had an architecture business and I spent a lot of time there as a child. And I, I think telling stories is a lot like building buildings.
That's just such a fascinating way to approach writing.
Thank you. It helps me, you know.
I know you also teach fiction writing. Is that something you also advise your students?
Mary Morris:
You know, to be really completely honest, I really hadn't thought of that whole architecture thing until we're talking right now, which is something I really love about doing these kinds of interviews and talks. So it is something I will incorporate now into things I say to students, because I think it's always good to find some metaphor in your own life that works for you. Like also gardening works for me. Like there are ways that, I've been working for about 10 years on an essay that maybe I'll finish about what gardening taught me about being a writer, because you can take anything out, can move anything around, you can cut anything back. So if you're struggling with a book, you know, go out in the garden if you have one and do some pruning and then maybe it'll help you work on the book. I mean, I don't do that a lot. So I like to find those metaphors.
Book One: a Jewish book from childhood — The Last of the Just by André Schwartz-Bart.
Mary Morris:
Probably I was 16 or 17 when I read The Last of the Just. To be fully honest, my parents were not really, I grew up mainly in a secular household, but I became very interested in Judaism as I got into my teens and then later in my life it has become an important passion of mine. I don't remember how The Last of the Just came to me, but I was an avid reader as a girl and it's a multi-generational narrative.
It's based on the myth of the Baal Shem Tov that there are 36 just men and the world needs those men to hold up the suffering of the world. And if that number changes, the suffering of the world becomes out of balance and it's too much for the world to bear. And you never know if you're one of the chosen, which is all part of it. That's why we all have to live just lives. We all have to live lives that are, you know, upright and have a good moral compass. And the novel goes through many generations of people, following a just family or just generations, until the Holocaust. And then the suffering becomes too great. So I think I'm remembering it correctly. It won the Prix Goncourt and it impacted me. It gave me a very different sense of Judaism and what it meant to be Jewish and Jewish history and the whole idea of the just men or I'll call them just people, just humans, you know, and that kind of sense of moral responsibility that we all bear that has always stayed with me.
Well, I'm curious first what, a little bit more about your Jewish upbringing. I know you said you were raised in a secular household and also you said that this changed or gave you a different idea of Judaism. So I'm curious what that was.
Mary Morris:
Right, well, let's just be straight here. My parents named me Mary so people wouldn't know I was Jewish by my name. It was right after World War II. I mean, they were quite assimilated and they just didn't want people to identify. I mean, because I'm named Mary, I've had lots of anti-Semitic things said to me in my life. You know, things I've had to correct with people who didn't know I was Jewish. I've had friends, longtime friends call me and say, are you Jewish? You know, so it's just been a kind of thing in my life.
And we had almost virtually no Jewish education. I remember a moment sitting at the dining room table, maybe I was about 15 or 16. And my father said a Hebrew word. And I said, what does that mean? And he looked at my mother and he said, well, didn't we send her to Hebrew school? And I'm like, what? No, no, I didn't even know. You know, no, you did not send me to Hebrew school. So that didn't happen. So, you know, I just started to embrace it. And I think that this novel, I just didn't get it until I read this book. What Jewish history was or is and the whole question of being a scapegoat and the whole sense of responsibility that we all bear in this world and persecution. I mean, I will say my parents were very good liberals in their thinking and the whole idea of persecution and oppression was really strong in my household, you know, civil liberties, all of that. So this book just gave me a sense of like, we are just all responsible for each other and whether we know it or not, we all bear that, the weight of the world and we have to behave accordingly. So I don't know, it just gave me a sense of context and history and it just is a wider perspective that I never had till I read that book. I mean to me it was kind of a little bit of a joke, like grandma wouldn't come to the house because we had a Christmas tree. Okay, whatever, you know?
It sounds like your parents were trying to protect you from that legacy of persecution. Was there something in their lives that they'd experienced that that was stemming from?
Mary Morris:
I mean, all four of my grandparents fled Ukraine during the pogroms. I think that history, that generational suffering, you know, I read this study recently that if you stress out a rat, it takes five generations for that stress to leave. It changes the DNA. It takes five generations. And I think, you know, my parents were basically first generation. And they lived with these paranoid fears that not, I mean, they were not paranoid in their own country, but they became sort of paranoid here and they just didn't really want people to know. I mean, it wasn't like they pretended they weren't Jewish. It wasn't that, but it just, embracing Judaism was not something they were interested in. And they, they wanted me and my brother to not be identified that way. So yes, I mean, it was kind of like passing to be honest with you, you know.
And as you mentioned, the book starts with the Levy family, this one family of hidden righteous people in York, England in 1190 and then kind of as a collapse of Eastern European Jewish history through all of these various persecutions and it culminates with Ernie Levy who dies in Auschwitz. So that is obviously one version of Jewish history. You've now written two books that are really delving into Jewish history. So is that version of Jewish history, is that a story of Judaism that you identify with?
Mary Morris:
I think that's the part that has been more interesting to me in my life and in my writing is the whole idea of buried histories. So each of the two books that I've written, Gateway to the Moon, it's a novel about the crypto-Jews of New Mexico that I learned about when I was doing some other research. I learned about when living in New Mexico that there was this people who believe they were Jewish. This was actually before they had been identified through DNA, but who believed they were Jewish.
And we actually had a babysitter. We lived in New Mexico and he worked for us briefly. And at one point when he found out we were Jewish family, he asked me if we lit candles on Friday, if we ate pork. And I said, no, we don't eat pork. And he said, my family doesn't eat pork either. He said, isn't that strange? And I said, that's really interesting. Yes. And he said, you know, and my whole town doesn't eat pork. And I was like, okay, wait, this is like a kid, tall Hispanic kid in New Mexico. You know, lives out in a small village and his town doesn't eat pork. And I was like, that's really interesting. So I'm interested more in buried histories. You know, I shouldn't call myself an optimist, but I do feel, I mean, one of the things I learned in New Mexico from a guy I met, I met a random guy, he owned a diner and he took me to his family cemetery. I asked to go, but all of his ancestors were buried there and I was fascinated because he could go back 400 years.
And I don't know where anybody's buried, you know? So that to me, so Gateway to the Moon and The Red House are about buried histories. And there's a third novel, which I think will be the last one that I'll do of this, which has to do with Jamaica and also the secret histories of Jews in Jamaica and why Jamaica is actually the only former Spanish colony that never persecuted the Jews. So that's a novel in the works now.
That's so interesting, starting with your name. You talked about how you didn't have much of a Jewish education, but you did become more interested. And this book was maybe the start of that. What did that look like for you over time? What was this growing interest in Judaism? How did that manifest itself in your life?
Mary Morris:
I've always been very curious and I've always been a good student. So I just wanted to learn more. So I just started really there with a kind of educational place. I like languages and linguistics, so I studied Hebrew. I got closer to my grandmother and her sense of religion. I came to understand why the Christmas tree was so offensive to her. I didn't get it as a girl. She taught me how to cook, also. So I have a lot of old Ukrainian recipes that I love and just the culture.
Things that I came to love in the ritual. Like one of the things I love, my husband grew up in a Christian family, but he's basically become Jewish. I mean, we have a Jewish household. I don't know. You know, there's that moment on Yom Kippur where we all stand and recite our sins because we are all in this together, right? It's not like going to confession as a Catholic where you say, well, I did this and I did that. We stand as a community and we all did this. If I do this to you, you might do something else to someone else. And I just embrace that idea that we all are a community, we all take care of each other. Just the philosophical, ethical ideas grew on me and the rituals grew on me. So it just was a process that I went through over many years. I think we all come to religion in our own way, in our own necessity. To me, it's more like a way you live your life. I don't care how many times you go to synagogue, if you're not helping your neighbor or thinking about someone who's sick or just doing those acts of kindness and generosity, you're not really living that life either.
Book 2: a Jewish book from adulthood — The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadesh.
Mary Morris:
It's the story of a trove of writings. They were documents that needed to be ritually destroyed and they were found in a closet of a house. And there's a researcher. The story moves back and forth between contemporary London and this trove of documents found and a mysterious scribe who wrote them. And the researchers are all trying to figure out what this trove is and who wrote them.
And what I loved about the book, first of all, I was researching Gateway to the Moon when I was working on it. And there's so much about Portugal and about the Inquisition and it, just a lot of history that's extremely well done. It's a big, thick book, but I love a book like that that's just a big sprawling story, of contemporary London and these researchers competing to figure out what these documents are and who will in the end possess them. And the backstory of the scribe. I don't want to give too much away because it's worth just reading it to find out everything.
Yeah, it absolutely is. But I definitely see the overlapping preoccupations, not just, you know, the fate of the Jews post-Inquisition, but also the woman, I believe her name is Esther Velazquez, who's the scribe. You know, she is a woman who's navigating on her own in a time period where that's very unusual. And then also the timeline shifting is something that you see also in your books. And even with the buried histories, what is it about going back and forth to the present that feels so resonant to you?
You know, I've really tried to write books that just have a straight ahead timeline, you know, fast paced books that just stick with one timeline, but I just never been very good at that. I'm too interested in, in what lies beneath, kind of a creature from the black lagoon sort of mentality, I think. I'm always wanting to know what's underneath it all. So I, I just always love the structure of moving back and forth either between characters or in time. You know, I like to play with structure and architecture. I think it's the things I'm drawn to as a reader that I'm drawn to as a writer.
I read somewhere that you print out pages on different colors and different timelines and then intersperse it after the fact. I'm so curious about that and how you sort of, what draws you to intersperse a timeline shift when you do? How do you know where to put those in?
Mary Morris:
Right. Well, this is an actually really, I love this question, Tali. I love it. So remember I started off by saying we do these house swaps, right? And we did this house swap to Southern Italy. Well, I think that year that we did the house swap to Southern Italy, I had 75 individual sections of Gateway to the Moon that were in no order whatsoever. They were a mess. But I do print on different colored paper. So for example, in All the Way to the Tigers, there were, I think, four or five timelines. And so there's stuff that happens in the jungle. And I think I printed that on yellow paper because it has to do with tigers and that was the closest I could get to looking like a tiger. And then I had an accident on ice and I printed that on white paper. And then my childhood, I think I printed on blue paper and then there were other timelines. Anyway, we get to this house in southern Italy and I had all these sections, I didn't know what I was going to do with them, but I had them all printed out. And I got up early one morning and the place where we were staying had this recreation room that I didn't know about. I found it. It kind of was a sort of meandering farmhouse. It was quite extraordinary. And my husband came down in the morning with his coffee and he saw me taking the net off the ping pong table. And he was like, oh my God, it's a ping pong table. That's great. We're going to play ping pong. And I said, no, actually we're not. I'm going to organize this novel on this ping pong table.
So this is what I do. I take all the colored pages and I lay them out on the biggest table I can find. I'll look at it and I'll say, oh there's too much purple there. Or gee, that's a big yellow section. Or there's no yellow here. I need to put something in there because this character needs to come back. Or this timeline needs to come back. And when it's done, it looks like a patchwork quilt. I used to go, they don't have it anymore, which is really sad to me, the map room at the New York Public Library, which had very large tables. And I would pretend I was looking at maps, I would take a couple maps down and they didn't really care and thenI can spread out on my pages and pretend to be looking at the maps and then that was all fine. But I need those really big tables and they're hard to find. I think I have to go back to Italy. I need a ping-pong table.
I also wanted to ask you about some of your travel writing and you were one of the first to write travel memoir when you started, as a woman, when you published Nothing to Declare, I think in 1986. What do you think we gain from hearing about travel from a woman's perspective?
Mary Morris:
Before I wrote Nothing to Declare, I was kind of flailing around, not sure what my next project would be. And I was having lunch with my editor, Nan Talese, and Nan said to me, well, why don't you write about travel? You're traveling all the time. You don't write about it. And I thought at that time, well, honestly, as a woman, I didn't think that my experiences were that interesting. I met people, I talked to them, you know, I got lost, I got found, you know, whatever. But when I started to look into my notes, I realized that women move through the world differently than men. It's just a different experience. You know, I am always looking behind my back. I am cautious when I'm walking down a dark street and I've never gotten in trouble. So, so far so good. And I just feel that I think I found a way to talk about experiences of women and how women move through the world that impacted a lot of women. It's not why I wrote it, but it was a great part of writing that book.
And obviously things have changed enormously. You know, I mean, there weren't women airplane pilots when I wrote Nothing to Declare. You know, I was once in Miami giving a reading and a woman came up to me. She said, you're Mary Morris. I said, yes. And she started sobbing. And I said, what? And she said, I was living in Nebraska and I knew that what I wanted to do was salvage treasures from the sea. And I just read your book and I decided I was going to follow my dreams and I moved to Florida and I have a salvaging company and that's what I do. And I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't read your book. So those kinds of ways of empowering women to say, wait, I can do this. I don't have to wait around. I don't have to wait for a man to travel, even to have a child. I also made a decision to have a child on my own. I mean, I'm very happily married for many, many years, but women just had to make decisions for ourselves.
And what is it that you love about travel?
Well, I love people. I love culture. I love language. I love food. I love wine. So I love all those things. I like seeing the world differently. I've always done better out of the house than in the house. I mean, I think I'm a better gardener than I am a housekeeper. You know, the house I grew up in was complicated and I spent a lot of time, I mean, where I grew up in Illinois I could do a lot of wandering around. There were these Indian trails, the Paduahtami, who had lived in the area 100 years before, had marked trails all along Lake Michigan, and I could follow them as a girl. They're gone now, sadly, or they're either gone or fenced off. You can't free range anymore there. But I could just, even, I was small. I mean, my mother, we had a cowbell, and when it was time to come in, she rang the cowbell, but I could have been a mile away, you know? And so I was a very free-ranging child, and I loved that. My mother also always wanted to be a traveler. I mean, she was desperate to travel, and my father wouldn't go anywhere. So that also was part of the tension in my household. I, my mother had a degree in fashion design from the Art Institute of Chicago, and she designed costumes for her children for Halloween. Like, she would have been Coco Chanel now. You know what mean? I, she would have had a fashion line. She should have had a fashion line. She was that kind of person. I think that also seeing that in my mother, how she was held back by her circumstances, by marriage, by suburbia.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Mary Morris:
Which I read when I was younger, but I reread it and I still love it, is To Kill a Mockingbird. And I think the story, the relationship of the siblings, and the social justice question of slavery and civil rights and racism. So they all have been very important and informative in my thinking.
Does that connect with your own life or family story in any way that it felt personal to you?
Mary Morris:
Yes, in some ways. This is a hard thing to sort of talk about, but I'm actually starting to write about it. So my brother, when we were growing up, was very dark, very dark skinned, and people thought he was a person of color as a child. So I experienced a lot of racism. I remember going into a deli that we used to go to and the people who owned the deli were Holocaust survivors. They had numbers on their arms. Went in with our housekeeper and, you know, they wouldn't let them eat there, my brother or the housekeeper. So there were ways that, you know, to her credit, it happened a few times with my mother. My mother was throwing a party once for the Jewish Federation and a woman came up to her and she said, oh, I think this is incredible. This is wonderful. Blah, blah. And my mother said, I don't mind doing this for the Jewish Fed. And the woman said, oh, no, no, it's not that you're throwing the party. It's that you invited your help's child.
And mom said, that's my child. My mother's a flaming redhead, right? Freckles. And she just said, that's my child. You know, so I grew up with this awareness, but then of course I also grew up during the civil rights era and Martin Luther King. heard Martin Luther King speak in Chicago at the Lyric Opera. I must have been a junior in high school. My dad was an amateur musician, and he would talk about the black and tans downtown and about the racism in Chicago. I was always interested from an early age in how racism played out in Chicago because it's such a North of 12th Street, it's white and South is the South side of Chicago. And that's because that's where the train stopped literally when the trains came up from the South. That's where they stopped. So, you know, Chicago things in my family, seeing my brother from a very early age, dealing with persecution in a kind of strange way, really made me think like what is wrong with us? Like literally, why does this matter?
Yeah, and it's such a painful part of our history, I think, or our culture, just that one persecuted minority could then turn around and feel that way about another persecuted minority.
Yeah. We all have a lot to learn.
Book Four: The book you're reading now — The Paris Stories by Mavis Galant.
Mary Morris:
So there's a few things I'm reading now. One is, we were recently in Paris and I was reading the Mavis Galant short stories that are set in Paris, just because she's brilliant and I love them. And it's also a wonderful feeling of Paris during that era. And she's also very funny. So she kind of gets the ridiculous expat life. And one of the things I've done always as a traveler and as a travel writer and as just a person is if I'm going somewhere, I always find books that connect to where I'm going. Like recently we were in Greece and I brought The Colossus of Marousi, which is Henry Miller's memoir about Greece and a book of poetry, Cavafy, and Zorba the Greek. You know, just because I like to immerse myself in the world I'm in.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Book — The Red House by Mary Morris.
You gave us a little bit of a synopsis earlier in the story centers around Laura, whose mother Viola disappeared 30 years prior to the opening of the book. And this idea of maternal abandonment is something that has shown up a lot in your writing. Another book, Night Sky, also has a girl whose mother has abandoned the family. What is it about that story that draws you to come back to that theme?
Mary Morris:
Maternal abandonment has actually been a theme in my writing and kind of in my life, really. My mother was a amazing, beautiful, complicated woman, but she wasn't very emotionally present in a lot of ways. And there were a lot of instances of that in my life where I would kind of go like, wow, that is not who I want to be or who I think I am.
This is just a classic example from my mother. She took me and my brother to New York. I think we were 12 and 9. We were supposed to go to the Easter Parade. And we're at the Easter Parade and, you know, there's millions of people and we're 8 and 12. And my mother saw someone wearing a hat that she thought was really interesting. She liked it. And the next thing I know, my brother and I are standing alone in the Easter Parade and she's disappeared. Like she's gone. And we're just standing there. And I'm like, you know, that wasn't, that was kind of typical. You know, I'd lose her in stores. She would wander off. She just, she just forgot she had children sometimes. So I remember going up to a policeman and I said, um, I don't know what to do, but we're lost. And he said, I said, we were supposed to have lunch at something called Rumpelstiltskins. He said, I think you mean Rumpelmeyers. I said, yeah, that's it. Rumpelmeyers. He goes, I'll take you there. And he took us to Rumpelmeyers and we had a reservation, we sat down. My brother and I are drinking hot chocolate.
And I see this crazy woman come in screaming, my children's here. She, you know, I lost my children. Then we're having, we're already having breakfast there. So she was that kind of woman and I had to get very, how do I say it? Self-assured early on that I could get out of situations and find my way home. Literally. She just wasn't very present. I don't even know what to say. I mean, I know she loved me.
So anyway, it was a theme that was important to me when I wrote The Night Sky. And then when it came to The Red House, I didn't really want to take on the theme of maternal abandonment exactly again, but I have always really been fascinated with the missing and the disappeared. And what does it mean if someone like walks out of your life? When do you stop looking? What does that feel like? So in 2005, I was in the Memphis airport. I was standing in line and something fell behind me, like I heard something drop and I turned around and there was a button on the ground, a fairly large button. And there was a man standing behind me and I bent down and picked it up and was going to give it back to him. And he said, no, you can keep that. And I looked at it and it was a picture of a woman's face and on it was written, have you seen this woman? And her name was Viola. Of course, the mother in my novel is named Viola.
He said, keep the button. It's my wife, she's missing. She left us and our two children. We were happy. I don't know what happened, but I give these buttons out in case you see her. So that was really, you know, and I kept that button on my bulletin board behind me for, since 2005, 20 years. So when I sat down to write The Red House, I thought, well, okay, do I just want to write about the historical, just set it then? And then I thought, well, what if, you know, I went back to that man in the airport and have you seen this woman? And I thought, well, what if there's a character who's searching for her mother? You know, what happens to children where your mother disappears? So those two stories kind of came together for me, like the historical part of the Red House, that's the button, and also just my desire to really write about the Holocaust and about some of the deeper parts of Jewish history that I hadn't explored.
Tommaso is a soldier, an Italian soldier, and his grandmother, and they are both very kind to the Jews who are being held in the Red House, which is a detention center. I don't know exactly how you would call it. What do you make of the myth of the good Italians, this idea that the Italian and the Italian army in particular were kind to the Jews during World War II as opposed to the German army?
Mary Morris:
It's complicated, I think. I don't think the Italians had the, I know they didn't have the taste for cruelty that the Germans had. I think they didn't really want to do much of what was required of them. On the same token, they were part of the Axis forces and they did Mussolini and Hitler's bidding. This particular town and this plaque and the gratitude of the people of Jerusalem to the people of this town is an example of good Italians. I think what really happened in this particular part of Italy is that I don't think they'd ever seen a Jew before. I don't think they really knew what Jews looked like. And I think they thought we were going to look really different or something. And then they found out that they were just regular people, you know, who had children and loved their families and had jobs and did what people did to survive. So, you know, of the people who were detained in the Red House, and yes, it was a detention center, only nine people who'd lived there were deported. And I don't know the circumstances under which they were deported. There are two kind of historical points of view on this from Italian scholars. For the most part, I think the idea of the good Italians has been debunked.
You must have done a lot of research to write this book.
Yeah, I did.
What was that process like?
Mary Morris:
There were some limitations because I do speak Italian, but the Italian is, it's difficult. So I went to the physical Red House, I found the person who had the keys to the physical Red House. The Red House is a, I mean, to give you some perspective, the Red House is a giant red cube that sits in the middle of a field with nothing around it. And apparently in the early thirties, Nazi soldiers went to that part of Italy and they saw that building.
And they used Auschwitz as a model for the kind of concentration camp they wanted. I found the guy with the keys. He let me in. I walked through the building. I did a lot of notes about what was inside. There were a lot of things still there in the house from, you know, the cots were still there. The cooking utensils were there. There was an old car there that the commandante had used to drive Jews into town who worked in town because they had to work if they were able to work, they worked. I think the most poignant thing for me was I found the list of library books that people, somebody set up a library and there were all these books that people checked out and brought back. And, you know, I was very moved by these library books and the names of people who checked them out and when they brought them back and it was all carefully written out. There were toys.
So it was very poignant, right? There were bars on the windows. There were no windows and there had never been. So the people were exposed to the elements. They had no blankets. They had no shields against the weather, elements, and they had no food. They had to forage and then work in town, make some money, figure out how to buy things. But they had no meat. They had no milk. You know, it was pretty grim. But they all survived except for the few that were sent away, and I don't know what happened to those few people.
Yeah, all of those elements that are in the book in the present day when they go back to the Red House. That's so interesting that that's actually what it was. That's fascinating.
Yeah, that is really what it was. And it was going to be turned into a discotheque when we got there. It really was about to be turned into a discotheque, but the guy who showed us is an arts administrator and he said that's not going to happen now. And so now it's becoming kind of an arts cultural institution, I think, when they get some funding.
And art does play such an important role in the book. Viola leaves her clue in her artwork where she's done all these paintings of the Red House. There's a character, Angelo, while they're detained at the Red House, he's painting. And I know that you also paint. So as someone who paints yourself, how do you see that connection between art and storytelling?
Mary Morris:
I mean, I've always been interested in visual, visual art. I wanted Laura to have some clues about her mother's history because she has nothing. So Laura is 42. Laura is the same age as her mother was when her mother disappeared. And Laura has had virtually nothing to go by her father remained completely befuddled by the mother's disappearance. Laura and her sister have basically fallen out. You know, she's been on her own for all these years, essentially, and kind of in a bad marriage and I don't know, it seemed to me that the paintings, you know, paintings also contain in a way, buried history. And the paintings that the mother did of the Red House with the phrase written on the back, I will not be here forever, is what spurs Laura on.
And that can be interpreted in the context of the book in many different ways. Is legacy something that you're thinking about? And when you're thinking about your legacy of writing and life, what do you hope that will be?
Mary Morris:
I mean, yes, I do think about it. You know, I have been working with an archivist to kind of go through my papers and sort out, you know, what to keep. I also don't really want my daughter to be stuck with a lot of stuff. I also have about 75 journals that I've kept over the years, and they really matter to me, actually, as much as anything. I have been digitalizing them because there's a lot of artwork in them. I mean, I draw and I paint a lot in those journals and collage in them.
And I'm working on a book called The Writer and the Wanderer, which is sort of about the journals. And in terms of kind of a larger thematic question of legacy, I mean, I think Nothing to Declare is a book that has made a difference. And, and I think it will continue to be an important book for people I hope to go back to. I don't know. I just try to write about these buried histories and I would love these, hopefully three novels, to become a kind of trilogy that people look at and that there's more than meets the eye with us. Michael Ondaji says it really beautifully in a memoir of his called Running in the Family, where he envisions his family as a family of acrobats that are standing in a pyramid all on top of each other and that he's the very top of the pyramid, right? So that, like, we have all these ancestors under us that are holding us up.
And I just think people should think more about that and what does that mean in our lives. And also as we go forward to realize every person has a history, everyone has a story, and everyone needs to be supported and cared for. You know, we are humans.
I had wanted to ask you, just, you know, I know so many of your books have Jewish characters, but you have turned to writing these very Jewish history, Jewish stories. Is that what it's about, this idea of foundation, or what is it that compelled you to tell these, like, sort of bigger Jewish historical stories?
Mary Morris:
I think the moment that really became important for me was 37 years ago in New Mexico when this babysitter asked me about my family and about being Jewish and about how his family didn't eat pork and how they lit candles on Friday night and his whole town did these things. I just started thinking like I guess I just wanted to know more. I wanted to know more about all of it and I wanted to know more about it for me and my family and my life. I don't know, you know, it's funny. I just get interested in something. It's not like a really, it's not particularly, maybe because I'm left-handed, it's not very methodical. You know, I'm not very linear. It's more modular. It's like, well, that's interesting. I think I'll follow that for four years, you know.
When I was working on a book called The Jazz Palace, I listened to jazz night and day and that book got rejected by so many publishers. I can't even begin to tell you. And I put it away for a long time. And then one morning I got an idea and my husband said he woke up and I was listening to jazz again and he knew I was back in the book. That that's how he knew. So it's like, I get interested in things, but then if I lose interest, it goes away. I don't know. It's a funny thing. So right now this is what I'm interested in.
What a gift for all of us. We're so lucky to reap the benefit of all of your meandering passions and interests. And thank you so much for being with me today. It was a joy.
Thank you, this was a really great conversation. Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the Five Books. Our guest today was Mary Morris talking about her book, The Red House. You can find a link to the book and all the others Mary discussed in our show notes. If you'd like an email reminder to keep you up to date with new episodes, plus links to all the books we discussed directly to your inbox, you can sign up in the show notes or on our website, fivebookspod.org.
If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe and share with your friends and family and rate and review an Apple podcast or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show. You can find us now online at fivebookspod.org. You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team@fivebookspod.org. And you can find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or Facebook at The Five Books Podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman.
Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
