Author, Artist, and Educator

 

David Solmitz, grew up in Brunswick, Maine, the only child of Nazi Holocaust survivors. His father, incarcerated at the concentration camp at Dachau, became a philosophy professor at Bowdoin College.

 

David followed in his footsteps for 40 + years as a progressive educator. He taught high school for 30 years in Madison, Maine. He also taught in Switzerland, and the People’s Republic of China, as well at Thomas College and Kennebec Valley Community College in the Waterville area. As a social and political activist, in the 1960s he brought the burgeoning anti-poverty effort to Brunswick, questioned and resisted wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, in the mid 1980s rallied for gay rights, and brought artists and performers to rural central Maine through the Performing Arts Council he helped create.

 

David's mother intended to be a commercial artist, but the Nazis forbade her to complete her art school. It was she who introduced David as a child to watercolor painting that has become a lifetime hobby. Wherever we travelled as a family she introduced me to museums housing many art forms from the classical to the contemporary.

 

David is married to Jing Ye, a survivor of China’s Great Cultural Revolution. As a psychotherapist at Colby College she continues her lifelong practice of Tai Chi, Chi Gong, and meditation. David and Jing reside in Waterville, Maine.