The Third Solitude

"A frank love letter to modern Jewish life." - MERVE EMRE, contributing writer, The New Yorker

An intimate memoir in essays seeking familial history and personal memory against the backdrop of the lost world of North American Jewry.

What is the past? How can we let it speak on its own terms, without forcing it into the categories of history? In The Third Solitude, Benjamin Libman gathers and weaves the threads of multiple pasts - of his community, of his family, and of himself - in an attempt to escape the inadequate narratives around Zionism that he grew up with, and to create nothing short of a new paradigm.

Across a series of interconnected memories, Libman leads us through the many fragments that make a life, unafraid to question deeply cherished beliefs about Jewish identity, and seeks to reconcile his own values with those inculcated in him. Along the way, he casts aside tired tropes and shores together the pieces of a new way of looking toward the future.

The Third Solitude is a paean to the art of losing, and to the visions of the past that persist in the present..

Benjamin Libman's frank, tender love letter to modern Jewish life reveals that the past is a vivid mystery and history a fiction that pretends to know more than it does; we believe it at our own peril. Merve Emre, contributing writer, The New Yorker
In exquisite prose that stretches centuries, continents, and literary genres, Benjamin Libman has written a memoir that attends with wisdom and candour to the treacherous riddles history continues to whisper into all our ears about the past and present we cannot help but find ourselves in. Ryan Ruby, author of Context Collapse
A writer of tenderness and complexity, of profound curiosity … This is a work of astounding beauty. Aria Aber, author of Good Girl

An urgent question troubles the heart of Ben Libman’s elegantly written political memoir about growing up in a Zionist community in Montreal: Why Israel? Why this? Reconstructing the story of his family’s flight from the European Holocaust to Montreal, alongside an account of Anglo-French settler colonialism in Quebec, Libman composes a concentric series of subtle queries on the collective synthesis of memory, the political uses of nostalgia, and the personal experience of critical distancing within the family milieu. With the assistance of a rich network of reference including Benjamin, Rilke, Sebald, Wordsworth, Hugh McLennan, and Leonard Cohen, the nuanced and intimate work of metaphor helps to elucidate the psychic knots of identity and community, to bring the reader to a poetics of history whose moment is the future.

- ultimately this book is an attempt to tell transatlantic Jewish family history that does not culminate in unquestioning support for Israel, which involves some painful conversations with relatives. Libman, a talented literary critic, interrogates the family-history genre, and muses wisely on the nature of history and memory more broadly.

Benjamin Libman is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Yale Review, the London Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. He divides his time between Paris and Montreal.

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