Finding Ida

Finding Ida is the story of the first three quarter of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of a Jewish Immigrant to New York. In 1901, 16- year old Avrom Sokolovsky was living with his parents and four sisters in a shtetl the Ukraine, when soldiers start grabbing Jewish boys for the Czar’s army. In order to escape conscription, Avrom’s parents send him, by himself, on a terrifying journey to join his uncle, Yudel, in the Lower East Side of New York. In 1976, Avrom, now Abe and in his nineties, is on another journey. He travels to find Ida, the woman whom he has been living with in South Beach, Florida, to try to get her to come back to him. Ida left without saying goodbye, when her son took her to New York for treatment for a newly discovered lump in her breast. On the bus to New York, Abe and Bessie, a black woman, discuss their lives and the Jewish and Black experiences in America. We hear about the three great loves of Abe’s life: Ida; Sarah, his wife of 60 years, and New York City, with all its imperfections. We see Abe and Sarah experience the First World War, the exuberant Twenties, the Great Depression and the Second World War, in which they lose one of their children. After the war, as their remaining two children raise their own families, Abe and Sarah pass from middle to old age, and eventually Abe loses his beloved Sarah to cancer.