The Third Solitude

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 Jewish identity.

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 fragments 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 is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Yale Review, the London Magazine, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He splits his time between Montréal and Paris.