By Stacey Dresner

WEST HARTFORD – Judy Bolton-Fasman grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut in a house on Asylum Avenue, a fitting address for the home that Bolton-Fasman admits contained more than a little insanity – and the perfect name for her new book.

For Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, Bolton-Fasman delved into the mystery that surrounded her parents: Matilde Alboukrek, her beautiful, vibrant Cuban-born Sephardic mother, and Harold Bolton, her serious, patriotic, Yale-educated Ashkenazi father, who was 10 years older than his glamorous wife.

Bolton-Fasman will discuss her memoir on Zoom, in a talk presented by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford on Thursday, Feb. 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Born in her father’s native New Haven, Bolton-Fasman’s family moved to West Hartford on Judy’s third birthday to be closer to Harold’s job as a CPA at Pratt & Whitney. 

She attended a public elementary school before enrolling in the Hebrew Academy for middle school. Her family attended Temple Sinai in Newington.

Curiously, when she was 24 and in grad school, her father mailed her a letter. Then, after reconsidering, called her to say that not only should she not open it, but she should burn it. And so she did.

After her father’s death at the age of 90, Bolton-Fasman began to take a deeper look into his past, contacting former associates, relatives, and friends, accessing records through the Freedom of Information Act, traveling to Cuba to search for clues. The result, after nearly 10 years, is Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets. In it, Bolton-Fasman comes to learn a big secret about her father, which people  can find out by reading the book or attending the Zoom presentation.

A graduate of Trinity College in Hartford, she received her master’s degree from Columbia University and has written essays and reviews for several publications including the New York Times and The Boston Globe. She is a four-time winner of the Simon Rockower Award for Essay from the American Jewish Press Association. 

A resident of Newton, Massachusetts, she and her husband are the parents of two grown children.

Judy Bolton-Fasman recently talked about her memoir and her upbringing in West Hartford with the Southern New England Jewish Ledger

JEWISH LEDGER: You lived on the corner of Asylum Avenue and Ballar Drive in West Hartford – is that how the book got it’s name?

JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN: The book is named actually for Asylum Avenue and the cover of the book has a picture of the house. The title for me was really a gift from the universe. I mean it couldn’t have been more perfect for my circumstances. My mother immigrated [to America] from Cuba in the late 1950s, but the rest of her family came after Castro took over the island, and they literally sought asylum. So asylum was very much a feature of my childhood and very much a feeling that I grew up with. And then, for those who read the book, there is that connotation of insanity and there was a lot of insanity going on in that house. So, it works on multiple levels.

What do you mean by insanity?

I think it was really hard for my mother. She really tried to transplant from sunny Havana to cold, wintery West Hartford. That engendered a lot of challenges and a lot of difficulties. And if you read through the book, you’ll see that family dynamics were strained and there was a cultural and age difference between my parents and in that gap a lot of issues sort of took root.

How did the two different cultures impact or influence your Jewish?

My father grew up completely assimilated and was not in any way attached to Jewish practice. And my mother grew up very traditional in Havana. She grew up in a tight-knit Sephardic community. She went to a Jewish day school called Theodor Herzl. 

But I will say one thing about my dad — he was very Zionist. He loved Israel. So, I guess that was how he identified as a Jew. But he never went to synagogue [growing up]. He didn’t know a Hebrew letter to save his life. I think that I say in the book, “he was a Jew who lip-synched the Shema.” So they grew up very differently in terms of faith traditions, that’s for sure.

My parents belonged to reform temples, first Congregation Beth Israel [in West Hartford] and then Temple Sinai [in Newington], so my father could feel more comfortable and we could get a chance of getting him to synagogue. 

But my mother wasn’t happy with the extent of Jewish education I was getting and decided that I should go to a Jewish day school… I ended up going to what was then called the Hebrew Academy of Greater Hartford [now part of West Hartford’s New England Jewish Academy]. It was it was a challenge because I didn’t come from a house that was necessarily observant. So there was that clash for me and that confusion, but I did get a thorough Jewish education.

Yet you went on to attend a Catholic high school.

It’s a crazy story. I came out of the Hebrew Academy sort of newly observant Orthodox, and that really did not please my parents. They were scared of it; they thought they were losing me. And there was not a Jewish high school [in West Hartford] at the time when I was growing up. My only options were to go to New York or to Providence, Rhode Island and my parents didn’t want to send me away. And frankly, it frightened them that I didn’t eat in their kitchen and that I was kind of detaching myself from the family. 

So I said, “Fine, I’ll go only to an all-girls school.” And they gave me a couple of options, one of which was Mount Saint Joseph Academy. And I said, “I’m going to go to Mount Saint Joseph Academy” in a very teenager-y, kind of tantrum way. I thought it would last two weeks and that they would eventually give in to me [and send me to a Jewish high school]. Well, I ended up loving it. I loved the camaraderie; I loved being in a single-sex school; the nuns were wonderful to me. And I ended up making lifelong friends and doing ecumenical programming with teachers there and inviting my rabbi to come for a Thanksgiving assembly. It ended up being a win-win situation for me, ironically enough.

Your book is a subtitled A Memoir of Family Secrets. Did your parents have big secrets?

Without giving away any spoilers, I knew something was afoot. [My father] had this very complex history and he had been to many kinds of mysterious places. What added to the complexity of our family life was that my mother was from a country that was on lockdown. We had absolutely no contact, no way to go there. And Cuba was a very big presence in our lives. There was nothing that I wanted more than to go there and I couldn’t, and that really influenced a lot of my childhood.

But you knew “something was afoot,” as you put it?

I knew that there were things about my father that he wouldn’t tell us. He was very silent. He never was a character in his own stories. He was kind of a strict dad. He was an older dad, so that already engendered mystery about him. I knew he had pictures from Latin America where he traveled. I knew he visited his best friend there a number of times and that [the friend’s] family had relocated to the what I call in the book “suburban New York, and we visited them every other month. So, there were all these things to kind of put together as I got older.

Did he ever tell you why he travelled to Latin America so much?

No, he said he was on vacation (Laughs).

Tell us about the letter that your father sent you and then changed his mind and told you to burn.

I think I burned it out of fear. I didn’t want to know what was in there because at the time he was getting sicker with Parkinson’s Disease and he and my mother were not having a good time of it. And I was afraid that it might have been a suicide note. My mind went to a lot of dark places. I held on to it for an hour or so, looking at it in the light and trying to figure it out, but I decided that the only [thing to do] was to honor my father’s wishes, 

A lot of people ask me do I regret burning the letter. I don’t, because it sent me on this journey. There’s an important strand [of the book about] saying Kaddish for my father for a year and of having this posthumous relationship with him. And I might not have had any of that if I had read the letter. And who knows? Maybe the letter was just really mundane! 

When did you start really looking into your dad’s past?

The year I said Kaddish was a very important year for me. I journalled about it and I decided I was going to write a book about that year. I worked on that for two or three years, and it really didn’t go anywhere. It was a very internal document; I think it would have been an interest only to my siblings and my kids. 

So, I realized that what I needed was a good old-fashioned story – an arc and a narrative. I was visiting my best friend in Israel and she said, you have to go out and find people who knew your father. Which was not so easy because at that point he was already almost 90. Many of his contemporaries had passed on. But I knew just the person to contact and I found my way to him. He was an old family friend, and it went from there.

Was it difficult emotionally to learn some of these things about your father?

No, I was curious as a kid. I took on the persona of Judy Bolton, Girl Detective. Judy Bolton had her own series of books in the 40s and 50s — not as popular as Nancy Drew, but nevertheless, she had a series. So, the name came to me naturally. 

I think that I was always curious about my father because the first stirrings of Asylum were in a master’s thesis I did which was a collection of short stories. I got my MFA from Columbia University.  And I had to write a thesis and the name of my thesis was “The 90-Day Wonder,” which was very much alluding to my father during the Second World War. I later learned while I was doing research that that is a pejorative term. Basically it was a program that fast-tracked young college graduates to be officers in three months. Where it becomes pejorative is that a lot of the sailors, or corporals or whoever they were commanding were resentful. You know, they had socks older than these guys. And they called them ‘90-Day Wonder’ in a pejorative way. My father was a 90-Day Wonder. I believe he went almost immediately after he graduated from Yale to the Brooklyn Naval Yard to train. He was a lieutenant commander in the Navy and he was stationed in the South Pacific during World II. So that thesis was the first stirrings of Asylum.

Without revealing any spoilers for those who haven’t read the book yet, does your book reveal your father’s secrets?

I did. I want to backtrack a little. The book is non-fiction, but speculative non-fiction, and for me, that means that I mixed speculative non-fiction, my own speculations with the facts I had in hand. And it yielded for me a profound unshakable truth.  

Will you share that “unshakeable truth” with the Zoom audience on Feb. 17? 

As my kids say, I’ll take the temperature of the Zoom room and see what happens.

Author Judy Bolton-Fasman will speak on Zoom, Thursday, Feb. 17, 7:30 p.m., presented by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford. For information, visit jhsgh.org.