The author of many works of literary fiction, Mary Morris offers a penetrating psychological narrative in her latest novel, The Red House, which focuses on a daughter’s quest to understand her mother, who vanished from the family many decades earlier.

Laura Wilkins was only 12 when her mother, Viola, walked out the front door from their home in suburban New Jersey on an ordinary school day in 1972—leaving behind her keys, wallet and paintings of a mysterious red house. The unsolved mystery propels Laura, now 42, to embark on a tour of Italy, her mother’s birthplace, to uncover Viola’s childhood during the rise of Mussolini and learn about the events in her life that may have contributed to her disappearance.

At the outset, Laura knows nothing of Viola’s childhood, including that her mother’s family was Jewish. Indeed, she had always thought her entire family was nominally Catholic. Suffice it to say that the information she amasses during her journey is both devastating and revelatory.

But not only devastating. Also liberating.

Morris provides a clear and strong perspective on the insidiousness of secrecy. What happens to those who feel that they can never share their stories and feelings? Nothing good, Morris posits.

The novel shifts between Laura’s present-day search for her mother and that red house, with flashbacks to both Viola and Laura’s childhoods. After moving to the United States and assuming the role of wife, mother, librarian and dilettante painter, Viola could be described as “perky,” at least as Laura perceived her during her childhood years. But that perkiness was, her daughter later comes to understand, a facade, an effort to conceal a woman racked with guilt and trapped in unremitting grief from her tumultuous childhood, shaped by the cruel treatment of Jews in Italy during World War II. The cost of maintaining that facade was incalculable and, ultimately, unbearable.

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Online Event: Unraveling a Mother-Daughter Mystery, With Author Mary Morris

Join Hadassah Magazine Presents on Thursday, February 12, at 8 PM ET, as Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein speaks with award-winning author Mary Morris about her recent novel, The Red House. A mystery that toggles between contemporary New Jersey and Mussolini’s Italy during World War II, the book explores hidden Jewish identity and history and the lasting impact of trauma.

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Do the sins of the mother befall the daughter? Yes and no, Morris seems to suggest. Laura is an artist by training, but she, like Viola, traffics in cover-ups. She earns her keep as a house stager, always thinking about what “staging can hide” to erase the past. Early on, she describes it this way:

“I don’t stage for the theater, but for residential real estate. I make rooms look bigger or cozier. I bring in snazzy furnishings, fancy mirrors. I give people ancestors and histories they’ve never known. I rifle through boxes at flea markets and buy photographs of strangers on yachts or a glowing family in front of the Eiffel Tower. I create elegant, affluent lives. Love for the brokenhearted. A couple kissing, a child’s first swim. I invent warm memories for the sad houses of widows and divorcées.”

Morris, whose earlier novel, Gateway to the Moon, also dealt with secret lives—those of conversos, or crypto-Jews, of New Mexico—has talked of her own journey as a Jew from a family that downplayed its Jewishness. She knows of what she writes, and what she writes is riveting stuff, indeed.

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Robert Nagler Miller writes frequently about the arts, literature and Jewish themes from his home near New York City.