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.
Lisa Robertson, poet and author of Boat and The Baudelaire Fractal
- 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.
The Berliner
The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism.
Morten Høi Jensen, UnHerd
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.
The Berliner
The quiet stasis of this archival photo; the dynamism of the distorted figure traipsing across a torn page; the delicate rip itself. I can’t imagine a better outfit for Benjamin Libman’s important personal history, which complicates the divide between anglophone and francophone cultures in Montreal.
Emily Mernin, Associate Editor, Literary Review of Canada
“I want to trouble the way we write history,” says Benjamin Libman – The five essays in The Third Solitude make for a dynamic whole.
Elise Moser, Montreal Review of Books