How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s memoir, 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. Judy Bolton 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, American patriotism from her father. 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. 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.
Nonfiction
Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2020
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