Benjamin Libman is a Paris-based Canadian writer who has mined the geographical specifics of his family’s history, from Nazi-occupied Austria to post-war Canada, in order to challenge the creation of conventional narratives. In his recent memoir, The Third Solitude, Libman revisits his own past in order to arrive at a clearer understanding of his extended family and their travails, his community of post-war Jewish immigrants in Montréal, and the Zionism that has become ingrained in them. I sat down with him to discuss the unique challenges that the writing of historical narrative poses, the unique position of the Jewish community in French-speaking Canada, and his commitment to rejecting the Zionism he was raised with while demanding the same of others.
Can you give a brief sketch of how The Third Solitude began to take form as a writing project?
The core of the book begins before I started publishing writing. In the summer of 2014, I went to Vienna as part of a larger trip through Europe to meet a woman who’s effectively a member of my family, although the relation is a bit more complicated than that. She’s estranged from us, as an accident of time and circumstance. She is about my parents’ age, so her generation were in touch with my parents’ generation—my father and his siblings when they were much younger—but no one had met them since. In the book her name is Marta, but she goes by a different name in real life. She responded to my email reaching out and very kindly invited me to come stay with her. It turned out she was a wealthy Viennese woman with an opulent home, and I had a very interesting week there. One of the outcomes of this week was that I received from her mother, who was from my grandmother’s generation, a stack of documents, including letters and photographs, and then some different unclassifiable documents, miscellaneous papers and things, all of which she determined belonged to my part of the family. Most of them were letters that my great grandmother, who had fled Austria in 1938, had written to her brother, who had stayed in Austria and whom she hadn’t known was already captured and dead. But some of the documents were also photographs and other materials belonging to her brother. These were in the hands of this Viennese family because my great grandmother’s brother had married a Christian woman named Risa (yes it’s all a bit convoluted), who was a hoarder. She kept these things and passed them down to the Viennese side. Being a Christian, Risa was able to stay in Vienna through the war. So that part of the family ended up expanding there and living on generation to generation.
Anyway, I got these documents. I knew they were important to my family and to my understanding of my family, but I didn’t yet know what to do with them. Most of them were in German, which I didn’t yet speak, and a lot of them were in Polish and Russian and Yiddish. Fast forward four or five years to 2019. I’m in grad school, taking a class on place, loss, and memory in the Second World War, co-taught by Amir Eshel and Alexander Nemerov (incidentally the son of Howard Nemerov, who was poet laureat of the United States). Nemerov himself, although he is an art historian and an academic, has a poetic way about his art historical writing and research. His writing was extremely interesting and influential to me. He has a great book called Wartime Kiss, which I recommend to everybody. It demonstrates what can be done with artifacts from the past when we don’t necessarily intend to make them fit into specific historical narratives. He treats all artifacts as things that exist and happen as events or encounters in the present. He was teaching this class and he encouraged us all to pursue our final assignments with the same creative spirit. I decided that it was a good time to take some of these documents and photographs I had been given in Vienna and see if I could begin writing about them. So I began with this photograph of my grandmother, her sister, and their two parents in the window of a train car and beneath them on the platform, the rest of their family. This is the photograph that they took right before the ones in the train left for Hamburg and then on a ship to Canada. This also represents a dividing line between those who left and survived, and those who stayed and died, although it’s not quite as neat as that. I began with the photograph, forcing myself to repress the impulse to fit this image into a well-worn narrative about the Holocaust. Because much of its poignancy seemed to come from what was about to happen when that photograph was taken — events of which everyone in the image were at that moment necessarily ignorant. Instead, I asked myself, strictly: what do I see in the image? And described it. Then another one and another one, and this sort of formed the vertebrae of that paper. That paper eventually became the first chapter of this book. At some point, I cut it down and turned into an essay, which I submitted to a small magazine. That essay was seen by an editor a couple years later and a proposal was built around the essay, into a book. That’s the genesis of The Third Solitude. It began with a trip to Vienna and turned into this kernel, which is chapter one around which everything else revolved. The rest of the book, once I got the commission to write it, was written much more quickly than that, over the course of a year, mostly here in Paris.
The book seems to straddle genres. Did you have one in mind when you started writing?
I didn’t. It wasn’t originally a memoir. I think this was a the most convenient wrapping to put over it, but in many ways the book is really not about me. It’s about the people and the places that made me. I’m the prism through which all of this is observed or narrated, but I think that’s true of any nonfiction book whether we like it or not. The plane of narration is an invention of the author, and serves as the medium through which all of the subject matter must pass to be seen. Originally, I would say the one thought I had at the beginning with respect to genre was this idea that I took from Nemerov: we should strive to find ways of resisting the impulse to do a classic historiography with historical artifacts. Obviously, classic historiography is a bit of a false term. Historiography has been a heterogeneous practice from the very beginning. But the idea was simply that if you have any impulse at all to take a historical artifact, whether a letter or a photograph, and fit it into a historical narrative that already exists, whether in your own mind or in the accepted discourse of the society you live in, you should pause, and resist that at least for a moment—bracket it, and try first to see what it is you’re looking at as such, if such a thing is possible. The artifact before you is not simply “the past”; it may not even be the past at all. It is, at the very least, an object in the present. It is made of paper and ink, or pixels on a screen. You can touch it, turn it over, zoom in and out of it. It says things, or it depicts things. Right now, in the present, it possesses certain qualities which it is your job to discover and draw out. This is an ethos or a spirit that I began the book with and tried to retain throughout. I think the product of that attempt has been basically a failure. Ultimately it wasn’t really possible for me to avoid writing history in a conventional sense in many parts of this book. That said, my hope is that the moments where I most clearly and viscerally struggle with that fact and try to resist it can be instructive or at least illuminating, That’s why the subtitle is that it’s a memoir against history. “Against” in two conflicting senses: being “anti,” but also leaning upon, using for support. It’s falling into the generic convention of being labeled as a kind of “anti-genre,” even though it’s of course embedded within one as well.
Did you have any books that you used for reference or for inspiration?
Yes, a lot of them actually. If you want not even the full list, but the full selected list of all the things that inspired and informed The Third Solitude, the reading list at the end of the book is the best place to go. To pick out a few that were particularly generative for me, Jan Zwicky’s The Experience of Meaning, Hayden White’s Metahistory, Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, W.G. Sebald’s trilogy, Said’s Question of Palestine. Actually, on that note, there is a whole list within this reading list of all the works specifically on Israel and Palestine that informed my thinking. To keep it at the more philosophical or generic level, there would be, again, Wartime Kiss by Alex Nemerov, Futures Past by Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time, which is an essay collection that Stanford translated and put out, Freud’s The Uncanny. There are three very crucial books by Georges Didi-Huberman: Confronting Images, Images In Spite of All, and The Surviving image. All very important works for me. Svetlana Boym’s, The Origins of Nostalgia, which made its way into chapter four explicitly, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia, and Roland Barthes Camera Lucida. A lot of Walter Benjamin here and there. Then there are other works on that list that are better sorted into either literary inspiration or specific historical works of reference.
Can you unpack the title, The Third Solitude?
In 1945 Hugh MacLennan, a Canadian novelist, published a novel called Two Solitudes, a mid-century Bildungsroman. It dramatizes through its central characters and its main protagonist the cultural and political divide between, on the one hand, the Francophone Catholic contingent of Canadians living mostly in Quebec, and on the other hand the Anglophone Protestant contingent of Canadians living all over the country. The point of the book is that these are seen as the two constitutive parts of Canada and Canadian identity at mid-century, after another war in which many Canadians, particularly Francopones, didn’t particularly want to fight, for reasons that I don’t think are are that wrong. A central concern for patriotic artists of this period was to figure out just what what Canada is — as a culture, an identity, and also a political entity. This is also the period when Canada was dissociating from Britain. Instead of revolting it sort of like the United States, Canada had sort of slowly left the British sphere of influence and the British state system. Instead of revolting it moved into its parents’ basement, and 1945 is the moment when it starts to figure out what it looks like to move out of the house entirely. Therefore, the question of what Canadian identity is and could be was of vital importance to its poets and its writers and the people who were doing the work of representing the soul of the people. Because of this, these “two solitudes” in MacLennan’s mind form the dialectical opposition that needed to be worked out in order to determine what a Canadian was or could be. Their conflict is constitutive of Canadianess, but also in some ways requires resolution, even if it’s not a merger or reconciliation of opposites or something like that.
That became a very influential book in Canada and for a long time, maybe even still, was taught in middle schools, high schools, and colleges. For some major writers, particularly the poets working in Canada in the second half of the 20th century, it became a kind of point of reference for them as they were figuring out how to sing the song of the Canadian people, you know, the Emersonian/Whitmanian task of making a literature adequate to this imagined New World community. Irving Layton and A. M. Klein, two Canadian poets who were both also Jews, used this formulation—they sort of quipped about the “third solitude” in Canada, which in their mind comprised the Jews of Canada, because they had come as an immigrant community of high impact over the preceding fifty, sixty years and in strong waves at particular times, including just after the Second World War. They were filling and performing a very specific and necessary function within the social fabric of Canada. At that time, they were still doing a lot of the trades. If you wanted to get your clothes tailored or your shoes cobbled or you wanted to buy your food from a grocer, you would, if you lived in the central parts of Montreal, descend upon Saint Lawrence Street (Boulevard Saint-Laurent), what was called the Main, and likely go to a Jewish-owned and operated shop for that purpose. They were the working class and the up-and-coming middle class, but they had a very distinct cultural heritage. They were obviously not Christians and didn’t belong to either of these “two solitudes.”
(Linguistically, they had an interesting experience in Canada. For the children of Jewish immigrants to have been brought up in French, they would have had, until recently, to attend the French Catholic schools. But of course, you couldn’t go to the Catholic schools if you were a Jew, so that’s why the Jews in Montreal tend to be Anglophones.)
So, the Jews were sort of the “third solitude.” The book itself takes this as both a given and a thing to be troubled. It asks whether any people in the context of Canada can really be one of the solitudes, or whether the concept of the solitude is more of a structural idea. It’s a structural requirement or feature of the system that can be inhabited by not just one group of people, but by any given people dependent on their circumstances. And what I discuss in the fifth chapter is that one of the tragedies of Jewish life in Canada is that we have slowly assimilated in exactly the wrong way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with assimilation, but the kind of assimilation we’ve done is an assimilation into the bourgeois class of a typically capitalist society. And so we have forgotten the various forms of solidarity that we were forced to forge in Europe or in North Africa or in other parts of the world prior to our coming. We have forsaken these ties in favor of the opportunity to be lifted up into the higher rungs of capital. It’s an old story, but no less tragic for being old.
And in our place, other people have come, of course, to Canada and are now finding themselves in a position that we were once in. A big political question for the Jews in Canada, and in Quebec and Montreal in particular, is whether we are going to recall that we were once in that position, and extend a sense of solidarity toward the people who are now in that position, or whether we are going to pretend, like everyone who suddenly makes their fortune, that it is a natural part of our constitution, rather than an accident of history.
What is at stake for you in the publication of a book that rejects the Zionism that you were raised with and demands the same of others?
I don’t want to overstate the case, but what’s at stake is life and death. Specifically, the life and death of Palestinians living not just in Gaza and the West Bank, but also living in Israel proper. And then, of course, all the Palestinians who have been exiled abroad. This is because to be a Zionist today, in the diaspora especially but also in Israel, is to support the regime that kills and immiserates these peoples. I know for a fact, because of the education I received for 11 years, that most diasporic Jews are ignorant of the history of Zionism — not only its original aims and means of achieving them, but also the distorted, ethnocentric worldview it concocted, and the blood it must necessarily continue to demand as the price for its achievements. The Zionism we were taught is defanged. It is full of positive affirmations related to “self-determination” a fraught term if ever there was one, and one which is, of course, hypocritically applied as a double-standard in the case of Israel.
To be a Zionist is to support an ideology that ensures that even if this particular iteration of the government were to go away or to fail, any one that might take its place would fulfill the objectives of the ideology and so would necessarily have to do the same thing, i.e, continue immiserating and killing the people who live in Palestine, and who were living on that land long before a ragtag group of nationalists from Europe, with the backing of the largest colonial power on Earth and a disputed interpretation of a millennia-old religious text, decided to claim it as their own and cleanse it of inconvenient peoples. If you’re a Zionist in the diaspora and you support Zionism, you functionally support your own country, the country you’re actually a citizen of, e.g. Canada or the United States or elsewhere, continuing to fund the state that carries out this agenda in increasingly ruthless ways. In the realm of the Law we have terms for this, like aiding and abetting. You vote for your own tax dollars to go toward the perpetuation of this killing and this emiseration. Sometimes they go toward manufacturing the bombs that turn children into dust. Ask yourself: do you consent to this?
So what’s at stake is quite important. If you can convince people to abandon Zionism, you can hopefully convince them, if they live in the diaspora, to demand their governments to do likewise, and to actively campaign against the perpetuation of Zionism as a state-governing ideology in Israel. This would be not the end, but the beginning of the end, of the suffering. As we all know, a huge amount of Israel’s warrant to continue waging destruction on Palestine is granted to it by the major western powers, including the United States and Canada and all the European nations.
Are you afraid or nervous at all about alienating yourself from your community?
I’ve already done that pretty well. What’s been so interesting writing this book at the same time as the assault on Palestinians following October 7 is that it’s also been this moment where a lot of people are deciding whether and how and when to speak up against Israel’s actions or the actions of the Canadian and American governments in supporting Israel. Because I’ve done a bit of that via social media channels where I still have a lot of mutuals with whom I grew up, it has been conveyed to me that it is already common knowledge in, say, the Montreal Jewish community, that I am more or less a persona non grata, that I have effectively betrayed the trust of the people who raised me and who educated me and who sustained me.
I’m beyond the point of whether I’m nervous or worried about it. It’s a fait accompli. I would like to have the opportunity nevertheless to convince those people to see Judaism differently, Jewishness differently, and to maybe give up their attachment to Zionism. So I’m concerned about whether their sense of wanting to shun me is so powerful a force for them that they would be unwilling even to hear me out, to read the book, even parts of it, or to read this interview or come to hear me speak at a book event and just listen for a moment. Because if I could reach even one person, it would be worth it.
Revisiting this question your teacher asked [as recounted in the book], do you feel like more of a Canadian, Québecois, Montréaler, or Jew?
I have sympathies for a lot of different places. I’ve lived in a number of different countries and been part of different communities. But that question is the wrong question. What I am as far as my citizenship isn’t a matter of feelings. It’s just a matter of fact. I am Canadian and actually, by virtue of a recent law passed in Austria, I’m also Austrian. These are socially constructed facts, but that doesn’t make them any less facts than the fact that I have ten fingers, or that you can buy things with money. Those facts have certain affordances associated with them. They enable me to vote in those countries, they enable me to live quite easily and reside quite easily in them.
But these facts also come with a certain responsibility. It is your responsibility to use what you’ve been given for a greater good. And it is your responsibility to rid what you have been given of the evil that attaches to it. To leave the world better off than than you found it, as they say. It’s trite, but it points straight and true.
The Third Solitude is now available from Dundurn Press.
Ben Libman is a writer and translator living in Paris. He is the author of The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History (Dundurn Press, 2025). Much of his work can be found at benlibman.info.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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