A frank love letter to modern Jewish life. MERVE EMRE contributing writer The New YorkerAn 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.