Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets
Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
Released August 24, 2021
Judy Bolton-Fasman's Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets recounts her investigations into the mysterious lives of her Cubanborn Sephardic mother, Matilde Alboukrek Bolton, and especially her Yale-eudcated Ashkenazi father, K. Harold Bolton. In the prefatory chapter, "Burn This," Judy receives a thick letter from her father, which she hopes will reveal his "trastiendas," his secrets. But before she can open the letter, her father calls and instructs her to burn it, possibly destroying the information she seeks. Judy embarks on a life-long quest to unearth the truth beneath her mother's fabrications, and the deceptions that mark her father's life. Judy contacts relatives and friends, invokes the Freedom of Information Act, travels to Cuba to search for clues, Squints at alumni magazines on microfiche in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library, and consults with clairvoyants. Reciting the Mourner's Kaddish for eleven months following her father's death, Judy still seeks "in the endless symphony of silence my father had left behind," a deeper knowledge.
Judy Bolton-Fasman is an award-winning writer on culture—literary, visual and film—for Jewish Boston.com and whose column on parenting and family life appears regularly in the Jewish Advocate. She frequently contributes to The New York Times “Motherlode blog”: and the Boston Globe. Her work has also appeared in Lilith Magazine, O Magazine. McSweeney's. The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Brevity and Catapult. She recently received a Pushcart Prize nomination and is a four-time recipient of the Simon Rockower Award for Essay from the American Jewish Press Association. Judy grew up on Asylum Avenue near Hartford, CT and now lives with her husband, daughter and son just outside of Boston.
