Pierre and Jean-Jacques Goldman, two brothers between shadow and light

2023-09-29 06:00:26

Two brothers find themselves, by chance in the cultural news, in the spotlight. The singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, to whom the historian Ivan Jablonka devotes a biography released on August 18, Goldman (Le Seuil, 400 pages, 21.90 euros). The activist, writer and robber Pierre Goldman, whose director Cédric Kahn reconstructs the second trial, which resulted in his acquittal after he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of two pharmacists in 1969 (The Goldman Trial, released September 27). Two men from a family with an unusual destiny, sharing a story that brings them together at the same time as it seems to project them light years apart.

Also read the review (2019): Article reserved for our subscribers The “suicide book” by Pierre Goldman

High intensity procedural closed session, The Goldman Trial brings to the surface of collective memory a forgotten figure of contemporary history. That of a Jewish child born during the Occupation to Jewish immigrant parents, communist resistance fighters of the Francs-tireurs and supporters of immigrant labor (FTP-MOI), a child as such doubly promised to death, both by the Nazi occupier than by the French state.

From his miraculous survival, from the immeasurable debt he feels towards the martyrs as well as the heroes of his family and his people, comes the destiny of a pariah, darkly and proudly assumed. Revolutionary, intellectual, robber, he risks his head for a crime which no one can claim whether he committed or not, wrote in prison, halfway between Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Jean Genet (1910). -1986), a plea for his innocence which proves to be a monument of French literature, Sobscure memories of a Polish Jew born in France (Points, 2005), died in 1979, at the age of 35, under the bullets of a commando, never found, entitled “Honour of the police”.

Ideological pawns

The biography of Jean-Jacques Goldman, born in 1951, is calmer. It is, in fact, the hagiography of an early generational fan. At the same time, the work intends to put this exceptional career under the socio-historical microscope which, like a symbolic passing of the baton between the 1970s and 1980s, crystallized after years of hardship following the death of the elder brother. The singer – unpretentious herald of a depoliticized generation who takes comfort in the virtues of humanism, philanthropic choir leader of the Restos du coeur – not only enjoys phenomenal success, but establishes with the public a story of love and esteem which, twenty years after his retirement from the scene, continues to bring him to the height of the “favorite personality of the French”.

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