Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets

by Judy Bolton-Fasman

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating saga, "Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets," recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton and her elusive, Yale-educated father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, “Burn This,” Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures that the contents will reveal the long hidden explanations, confessions, and secrets that will unlock her father’s cryptic past. Just as she is about to open the portal to her father’s “transtiendas,” his dark hidden secrets, Harold Bolton phones Judy and instructs her to burn the still unopened letter. With the flick of a match, Judy ignites her father’s unread documents, effectively destroying the answers to long held questions that surround her parents’ improbable marriage and their even more secretive lives. Judy Bolton, girl detective, embarks on the life-long exploration of her bifurcated ancestry; Judy inherits a Sephardic, Spanish/Ladino-speaking culture from her mother and an Ashkenazi, English-only, old-fashioned American patriotism from her father. Amid the Bolton household’s cultural, political, and psychological confusion, Judy is mystified by her father’s impenetrable silence; and, similarly confounded by her mother’s fabrications, not the least of which involve rumors of a dowry pay-off and multiple wedding ceremonies for the oddly mismatched 40-year-old groom and the 24-year-old bride. Contacting former associates, relatives, and friends; accessing records through the Freedom of Information Act; traveling to Cuba to search for clues, and even reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for a year to gain spiritual insight into her father; these decades-long endeavors do not always yield the answers Judy wanted and sometimes the answers themselves lead her to ask new questions. Among Asylum’s most astonishing, unsolved mysteries is Ana Hernandez’s appearance at the family home on Asylum Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut. Ana is an exchange student from Guatemala whom Judy comes to presume to be her paternal half-sister. In seeking information about Ana, Judy’s investigations prove to be much like her entire enterprise--both enticing and frustrating. Was Ana just a misconstrued memory, or is she a still living piece of the puzzle that Judy has spent her adult life trying to solve? Readers will relish every step and stage of Judy’s investigations and will begin to share in her obsession to obtain answers to the mysteries that have haunted her life. The suspense, the clairvoyant prophecies, the discoveries, the new leads, the dead-ends, the paths not taken―all capture our attention in this absorbing and fascinating memoir.

Genres: Jewish, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

248 pages, Paperback

Published August 24, 2021

Reviews

[Carroll Sandel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asylum grabs you from the first pages and keeps you reading until the wee hours of the morning. This memoirist grows up trying to navigate the stormy relationship between her stoic Yankee father who shares little and her volatile Cuban mother who tells romantic stories that may or may not be true. Bolton-Fasman takes you with her on the journey as she searches for their secrets. She deftly shares how her Spanish speaking mother and her commitment to say the Kaddish after her father's death impacted her. Not often does a book both educate you about a world unknown to you and also revealing her saga in a way you easily can identify with. You know these characters, you root for the protagonist, you're sorry the book comes to an end, but you are clapping for this writer for telling her story so well.

[Zibby Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is a story of the author's life. She recounts her search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the life of her parents, a Cuban mother, and a secretive father. This story starts with a letter from her father that she burns before reading it. This event kickstarts a lifelong investigation into uncovering family secrets, including a missing girl, many dead ends, and a fantastic conclusion that encompasses a 30-year journey.

One passage that stood out was when the author wrote about her anxiety attacks. She captured that suffocating and lonely feeling so well, saying, "The first time I had a panic attack, I was sleeping next to my boyfriend Michael when surges of adrenaline and waves of panic suffocated me. I was afraid to wake him, so I rocked back and forth in bed as if in prayer until the sun came up, and then I dry-heaved the rest of the day. The panic attacks were exhausting, and hiding them from Michael, more so. I desperately wanted to be the perfect girlfriend, composed and supportive. Above all, I tried to will myself to be strong. I could not tell my boyfriend how disabled I felt."

I loved getting a deep dive into the author's entire family history. There was one line I absolutely loved. The author said, "In school, I searched for what I didn't have, but at home, I searched for what I didn't know." This memoir shows us how we can all make sense of our lives, our families, and our histories by using memories, the information we glean from others, and noting how it makes us feel along the way.

To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/jud...

[Heidi Slowinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Judy Bolton-Fasman’s memoir details her investigation into her family’s past, in an effort to uncover answers to her long-held questions about her parents, including their unlikely union. Separated by a seventeen year age gap, Bolton-Fasman’s father, an Ashkenazi, was 40-years-old when he married his Spanish and Ladino speaking, Sephardic 24-year-old bride. After her father instructs her to destroy his old records, Bolton-Fasman spends decades tracing her family lineage in an effort to discover her past.

Bolton-Fasman paints a captivating picture of growing up in a household where silence and secrets were the norm. She gives an in-depth discussion of the paradox of her parents’ union, given their age difference and the differences in their cultures. While both are Jewish, their backgrounds created clashes and conflicts on a regular basis.

I appreciated Bolton-Fasman’s dedication to uncovering her family’s based and need for truth in order to better understand herself. Despite the challenges her parents’ conflicts created in her childhood, Bolton-Fasman’s portrays them with empathy and sensitivity. This well-written memoir is both a quest for understanding an individual spiritual identity and relatable tale of the family detective.

I’d like to thank the author for the free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

[Ann MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do our secrets define us? Do they reveal more about who we are than what we choose to reveal to the world? These are some of the questions that Judy Bolton-Fasman explores in her page turner of a memoir. She combines family history with a detective story as she probes the secrets her parents held--and the truths she eventually discovers. She takes us on a journey that not only acquaints us with vividly described, complicated people in her family, but also touches on larger issues: religious, cultural, political. A wonderful, multi-layered memoir. I love it

[Shelby Meyerhoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent. An exquisite memoir that will appeal to those who love both a good story and beautiful, innovative writing.

In Asylum, Bolton-Fasman searches not only for the most basic truths of her parents’ lives but also for the meaning of their secrets.

While her parents’ true story turns out to be unusual and shocking, what really gives this book heart is how Bolton-Fasman grapples with what she learns. And how she lives with the questions to which she may never find answers.

Her writing is lyrical and shape-shifting. While the book is written primarily in English, Bolton-Fasman is trilingual, incorporating phrases and imagery from Spanish and Hebrew as well. Her writing is both accessible and unexpectedly complex. With a story this interesting, one might expect the writer to lean towards the sensational, but instead Bolton-Fasman is meditative. The book is well-paced, interspersing vivid scenes with contemplation, imagination, and introspection. Sentences that in the hands of a lesser writer would be dispatched plainly, as simple exposition, offer delicate and surprising phrases instead.

Asylum is a page-turner with writing that is thoughtful and fresh.

[Deanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wish I could rate this higher, but Judy spent more time telling her reader she waa curious and little time proving it. Who would burn an envelope with answers? Who would finally take a 23 and me test and not want results? Curious?? She wrote an entire book telling us over and over she was curious....did I miss something??

[Molly Howes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, the debut memoir by Judy Bolton-Fasman, is a touching and captivating tale. We follow Judy as she grieves her father’s death and honors him with the mourner’s Kaddish. We also begin to understand her more as she revisits her childhood with this patriotic, secretive man and her mercurial, misleading mother. As she observes her parents’ unusual marriage, she helps the reader understand why it was so contentious: We learn about cultural differences between a Cuban American woman and her much older, Ivy League husband. Although they are both Jewish, their approaches to religion (and everything else) clash.

Over time, Judy begins to investigate the inconsistencies in the stories they’ve told her and encounters some truths they hadn’t wanted her to know. Through it all, she maintains profound compassion toward the deeply flawed people who raised her. She lets us admire and appreciate them as well, while we fall in love with this girl detective and the wise woman she will become. This is a deeply American story about dreams reached for and colliding with the dreams of another.

[Sandell Morse · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Judy Bolton-Fasman when we were associate artists at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and studying with the late Richard McCann. I fell in love with her work. Now, she has published Asylum, A Memoir of Family Secrets, and I am even more in love with her work. Bolton-Fasman tells her story of growing up in a house full of family secrets, a house of two cultures and two languages, a house of true stories, a house of lies, all knotted tightly together. Bolton-Fasman sets out to untie that knot and find the truth of her family. Why was her father in Guatemala? Why did he marry her mother? Who was her mother, really? Bolton- Fasman tells her story with beautiful, crystal clear prose. The memoir is meticulously researched and gives the reader insights into America's Cold War Past. Bolton-Fasman is a trustworthy, intelligent guide along Asylum Street, the street where she grew up and far beyond.

[Kristen Paulson-Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you love an absorbing detective story; learning about languages and Jewish and Cuban culture; and chasing family secrets, you'll enjoy this book as much as I did. Judy has a gift for creating indelible characters. I didn't read this book quickly. I dipped in and out, as these were chapters to be savored, written in the author's honest and funny voice, as she interrogated herself as deeply as she did the people in her family. I couldn't resist following Judy as she gathered clues about family members. In the end she is forced to reckon with how far she'll go to uncover the truth about her father. She is also forced to examine the stories her mother has told her about her childhood in Cuba. A tender, anxious, beautiful, compassionate story of a girl's search for the truth, and the formation of a girl detective's identity.

[Perlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This memoir was interesting, sad, and disturbing. The marriage and parenting of Bolton-Fasman's parents was volatile, dysfunctional, and deeply upsetting to read about. Bolton-Fasman's mother comes across as narcissistic and her father as defeated. For the author, there was a feeling of mystery underlying all of this, and wondering what that was. She does find some answers, but not others. It was a sobering read.

[Terry Gould · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very interested in Judy Bolton's quest to know her family history. But, she spent too much time declaring this, and not much time explaining what was up in her family. She was too rambling for me.

[Nanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not at all what I was expecting, but I'm still glad I read it. I learned about different types of 'family secrets' than those from my own experience. And I learned about cultures radically different from my own. Worth it.

[David Cohen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too close for comfort, but as biographies go, coming from a mixed Ashkenaz Sephardic family with a 17 year gap in age, the author's parents were doomed. Add a James Bond complex to the Dad and family secrets, this is no Asylum for anyone sane.

[Gretchen Cherington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asylum traces the great love of a child for her reluctant parents—her other a star-eyed Cuban beauty, her father an Ashkenazi Jew from Ukraine, both wrapped up in secrets that Bolton-Fasman valiantly and insistently seeks to understand. A great read in family memoir and cross-cultural chlldhood.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting memoir full of real family drama and emotions. Judy is very forthcoming about her own reactions, feelings and thought processes.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars. I was hoping for a book about identity and discovery, and while there’s certainly some of that, mostly this book is about longing and sadness.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying to understand her parents who were secretive and unreliable narrators of their lives.

[Michele Kites · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enthralling story.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay but a bit disjointed and repetitive. Interesting story but unresolved.