The Third Solitude

An intimate memoir in essays seeking familial history and personal memory against the backdrop of the lost world of Montreal 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 Montreal Jewish community, of his family, and of himself — in search of an answer to these questions. Across a series of interconnected memories, Libman leads us through the many fragments that make a life: the kaleidoscopic recollections of childhood, the search for meaning and resolution in the face of unspeakable tragedy, the attempt to reconstruct the past from the rubble of its blasted forms that scatter across the present.

The Third Solitude is a paean to the art of losing — and to the visions of the past that persist in the present. Out of it rises, like a phantom, an image of the world of yesterday.