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Piecing Scattered Souls: Maine, Germany, Mexico, China and Beyond
David O. Solmitz
This is a memoir, not a slim volume of verse—a retired Maine history teacher's attempt, as he neared sixty, to understand where his family came from. David O. Solmitz traveled, interviewed his dying mother, and transcribed his father's careful written account of imprisonment at Dachau, weaving these threads into a story that reaches from Germany to Maine, Mexico, and China. Published in 2011 by the small Maine press Polar Bear & Company, it's the kind of deeply personal family reckoning that carries the weight of the twentieth century in one household's history. The prose is earnest and unguarded rather than literary, and that plainness suits the material. For readers drawn to Holocaust testimony, immigrant family sagas, or the quiet work of piecing a life together from scattered records, it offers a heartfelt and specific account.
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The author
David O. Solmitz is a retired high-school history teacher, watercolor artist, and author based in Waterville, Maine. The son of a German-Jewish family touched directly by Nazi persecution, he came to this book late in life, driven by a wish to recover and record his family's scattered story.
The book
Piecing Scattered Souls is a memoir and family history published in 2011 by Polar Bear & Company. It braids Solmitz's own travels with his mother's recollections and his father's firsthand account of Dachau, tracing the family across Germany, Maine, Mexico, and China as its title promises.
How it reads
This is a personal, small-press memoir rather than a polished literary production, and its power lies in the primary material—especially the father's testimony—and the sincerity of the son's search. Readers come for the history and the human record, not stylistic flourish.
For more context
It belongs to the broad literature of second-generation Holocaust memory, in which descendants reconstruct and preserve the experiences of survivor parents.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- David O. Solmitz
- Publisher
- P&Co (Solmitz)
- Year
- 2011
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine