In The Paradox of History (1970), the Italian writer and antifascist Nicola Chiaromonte writes of the need to “free oneself of belief in the present world and its idols, which, no matter how far one’s mind may soar, makes one an accomplice and a prisoner”. Something of Chiaromonte’s defiant spirit is alive in one of the most thoughtful books I’ve read this summer: The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History (Dundurn Press) by the young Canadian writer and translator Benjamin Libman. “Memoir,” here, is slightly misleading: Libman’s book is less about himself than about the mental worlds he inhabits: one Jewish, one Canadian, and one literary-intellectual. And though The Third Solitude is not primarily about the unfolding carnage in Gaza, it is the best book I have yet read on what it means to be Jewish at a time when crimes against humanity are being perpetrated by the state of Israel.
Libman’s book begins with a family photo taken at Vienna Hauptbahnhof on 16 September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the window of a train shortly to depart are the author’s great-grandparents, Anna and Eugene, and their two daughters, Ada and Eva, all of whom escaped Europe for North America. Standing on the platform below them are 10 family members who stayed behind, and of whom only four survived past 1945. “This is the last photograph they’ll take together,” Libman writes. He recounts his own journey back to Vienna in his early 20s to meet a distant relative of his grandmother Eva, a woman from whom he receives a large bundle of photographs, letters, and other documents that had once been in possession of Eva’s uncle Max’s widow.
And yet The Third Solitude resists telling the author’s family history, tempting though it must have been to commit what W. G. Sebald, in The Emigrants, calls “a wrongful trespass”. The terrible, uncertain fate of Max, Libman’s great-grandmother’s sibling, practically calls out for novelistic speculation. All that can be ascertained is that he was arrested by French police while trying to reach Spain and put on a train to the Majdanek concentration camp. Libman learns as much from a 1947 “act de disparition”, a sort of belated death certificate issued by the French government. It reads: “Interned on 26 February 1943 at GURS; Transferred on 2 March 1943 to DRANCY; Deported on 4 March 1943 in the direction of LUBLIN-MAJDANECK (Poland).” As Libman explains, the vague “in the direction of” represents an official uncertainty about the location and manner of Max’s presumed death. He is not recorded (as he would have been) as having ever arrived at Majdanek. He “disappeared in the worst way imaginable”, Libman writes: “vanished in a question mark, in the space between one railway station and another, in the black ink of the words ‘in the direction of’.”
Libman’s restraint here is impressive. “Some memories are better left undisturbed,” he writes, adding: “How to stop speaking to our artifacts, stop breaking the shell for the sake of the nut, and instead let them speak to and through us: that is the challenge.”
“Something of Chiaromonte’s defiant spirit is alive in one of the most thoughtful books I’ve read this summer: The Third Solitude.”
It is a challenge he lives up to by wandering down a series of intellectual cul-de-sacs instead, chapter-length reflections on the varieties of nostalgia (“nostalgia is a defence mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage”); on the self-mythologisation of Québécois nationalists; on the peculiar history of the Jewish day school in Montreal that Libman, like his brothers and his parents, attended. What unites these seemingly disparate considerations is a scepticism towards the uses and abuses of history. The way, for instance, Québécois nationalists have feigned ignorance of the historical forces that brought them to Canada in order to see themselves as a kind of indigenous nation always threatened by the Anglo-canadien.
But, of course, the “black hole” at the centre of The Third Solitude is the history of Zionism and the problem of Israel, a country Libman’s great-grandmother, Anna, described as a miracle, but which the author can only view with shame. Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion, a millennial Jewish writer’s reckoning with the pieties and shibboleths of his education and the capture of Jewish life by political Zionism. Why, Libman asks, was it necessary for students at a Canadian Jewish day school to sing the Israeli national anthem or participate in the annual Israeli Independence Day rally? Why did almost all of the students, Libman included, visit Israel as part of a high-school fellowship? And why were Palestinians, let alone the Nakba, never mentioned?
The Third Solitude is a forceful protest against this seizure of Jewish life by Israel and political Zionism. And while Libman is never as rude or irreverent as Philip Roth, I was nevertheless reminded at times of Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman who, in The Counterlife, describes Israel as a militant escape from traditional forms of Jewish life: “All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once so universally popular — no more Jewy Jews, great!”
“‘Libman’s book is thus a contribution to a long tradition of intellectual rebellion.”
One of The Third Solitude’s most memorable moments is Libman’s account of the time he went on the March for the Living, which every year brings Jewish students from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust. In Libman’s telling, however, an ostensibly important educational experience becomes a bizarre historical pageantry. It involved students singing old Jewish songs at the top of their lungs in the middle of a residential area in Kraków, as though Poland remained stuck in 1939-1945. “It was like going to the United States and insisting that everything was as it had been during the Civil War,” Libman writes. Later, during a trip to the Buczyna woods, where 10,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed and buried in a mass grave in 1942-43, Libman notices a plaque displaying the opening lines of the Israeli national anthem, the “Hatikvah”, as well as an Israeli flag. What, he wonders, has Israel got to do with the horrors that befell European Jewry back then?
This is organised remembrance, the monopolisation of memory. “Holocaust is perpetually yesterday and tomorrow,” Libman writes, adding that this could just as well be the motto for the State of Israel, mired as the country is in a “presentist ideology” that cannot let the past be past, let alone dare to imagine the future. At the end of the book, Libman returns imaginatively to the arrival of Anna and Eugene, his great-grandparents, in North America in 1938, at a moment when different futures were still possible. “Concretely,” he writes, “they were the visions of Jewish life that had yet to be captured and assimilated into political Zionism: pluralistic belonging in North America, for example; or a global, secular socialism in which traditional cultures and languages were nurtured as syndicates; or even, in a bid to divert the already moving colonial-Zionist project toward a more humane direction, a non-theocratic, multi-national, democratic state in Palestine.”
Libman emphasises the need to resuscitate some of those “vanished visions of the future”, not in the sense of turning back the clock, but as a reminder that the future, no matter what the presentist ideologues may claim, is something that can yet be created. What exactly this future might look like is beyond the purview of The Third Solitude, as perhaps it lies beyond the scope of any single person’s imagination. To recognise this is simply to accept that imagining a better future is one of our shared responsibilities, and that any political project that consigns us to a doom loop is not worth having. As Louis MacNeice once wrote: “What we are about to do / Is of vastly more importance / Than what we have done or not done hitherto.”
