When Solly Met Edie

Description

Full color interior with over 450 photos. Sol turned 98. Edie was 91. After 71 years of marriage, they still held hands, kissed, and said, “I love you.” Suddenly, she was gone. I moved in to my father's home to take care of him after my mother’s passing in September, 2016. We went through Edie’s things, and, in making room for mine, unearthed cartons of photographs, slides, and negatives that Sol remembered having tucked away, but hadn’t looked at in decades. Sol and I sat at the table leafing through a lifetime frozen in stagnant images. With the turn of each photograph, Sol identified people and recalled adventures and dramas, struggles and joys going back almost a century. With each anecdote, he breathed life back into those images. I understood that as he approached his 99th birthday, Sol was the last repository of Ader lore. Using the photos as a skeleton, Sol built a living body of human experience stretching back to the great-great-great grandparents of the youngest members of our clan. If not recorded, generations of who-we-were would be irretrievably lost when Sol joins Edie. This is not a biography, but a photographic essay, a memoir, a compendium preserving the spirits of those who survived long enough in a hostile Europe to send their children across an ocean to new opportunity, and how one sliver of the greatest generation fulfilled that promise. “When Solly Met Edie,” is likely relevant only to our gene pool, tributaries that draw from it, and a few puddles that have formed along the way… plus, perhaps, those interested in a genuine account of the lives of authentic people.