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.
