Asylum
A Memoir of Family Secrets
While away at grad school, Judy receives a thick letter from her father that she hopes will reveal the long-hidden explanations and confessions that will unlock his cryptic past. Before she can open this portal to her father’s transtiendas, his dark secrets, Harold Bolton calls and instructs her to burn it. With the flick of a match, Judy ignites the unread letter, effectively destroying potential answers to long-held questions surrounding her parents’ improbable marriage and their mysterious lives.
In Asylum, Judy lives out her childhood moniker — Judy Bolton, Girl Detective, after the Nancy Drew-like character in the Margaret Sutton books — to solve these puzzles for herself. She continues the lifelong exploration of her blended ancestry: her mother’s Sephardic, Spanish/Ladino-speaking culture, and her father’s Ashkenazi, English-only, old-fashioned American patriotism.
Amid the havoc of the Bolton household’s cultural, political, and psychological confusion, Harold’s impenetrable silence mystifies Judy — while her mother’s fabrications similarly confound her, not the least of which involve rumors of a dowry pay-off and multiple wedding ceremonies for the mismatched 40-year-old groom and his 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 most notably, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for a year to gain spiritual insight into her father, Judy does not always get the answers for which she is looking. But down twisty new paths of inquiry, Judy discovers family secrets that transform her perceptions of her parents and herself.
ASYLUM, Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating memoir, is populated by vivid, complex, and original characters, from whom the writer inherited two languages and several mysteries to unravel and contradictory stories to set straight…. Asylum Avenue addresses the untold story of Jewish immigration from Cuba, 20th century American history, and family conflict, but as a kind of detective story begun by Bolton-Fasman as a little girl and completed after years of research and reflection. It’s delightful page-turner. —Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent and Boston Girl
ASYLUM is a deeply moving memoir that investigates the ever-complicated knot of familial love, loss and longing. Judy Bolton-Fasman beautifully captures that urge so many of us have to better understand those loved ones who were close to us yet nonetheless eluded our grasp. —Tova Mirvis, author of Visible City and The Book of Separation: A Memoir
Judy Bolton-Fasman’s profound quest to understand the mystery surrounding her Sephardic Cuban mother and her Ashkenazi American father is immensely moving, showing how unmasking hurt can lead to healing and finding the asylum of a wide-open heart. An unforgettable, deeply spiritual, culturally rich memoir!” —Ruth Behar, author of Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba
In this tender, poetic and suspense-filled memoir, Judy Bolton-Fasman examines the gaps in her parents’ pasts, trying to unlock the essential mystery of her life: her father. His enigmatic presence haunts the pages of her vivid and unstinting portrait of a family burdened with secrets and colliding cultures. —Rahel Musleah – Hadassah Magazine
Any disappointment sparked by the memoir’s opening pages gives way quickly to engagement in Bolton-Fasman’s emotional journey through time, place and memory. Her goals are familiar and highly relatable: to understand her confounding, obviously mismatched parents and to fit the puzzle pieces of her childhood into a larger whole. —Julia M. Klein – Forward
Bolton-Fasman shares her memories and conjectures in a new memoir, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” published in August. The book is her way of coming to terms with the transtiendas (the Spanish word her mother used for secrets, but literally meaning a “backroom”) that permeated her childhood home and accompanied her into adulthood. —Renee Ghert-Zand – The Times of Israel