We know Jean-Jacques Goldman, named the French’s favorite singer more than ten times. The interpreter of Like you (1983), Fly Me (1984), and the essential I give you (1985), is rather silent about his private life. However, one member of his family has a fascinating story. Director Cédric Kahn decided to tell it in The Goldman Trial, a film dedicated to the Pierre Goldman affair. Born in 1944 and murdered in 1979, the activist was the son of Janina (or Janka) Sochaczewska and Alter Mojsze Goldman. Wednesday September 27, 2023, on the sidelines of the theatrical release of the feature film, Telerama dedicates a portrait to this man who marked the judicial history of the country.
Born a year before the end of the Second World War, Pierre Goldman was taken from his mother by his father
Considered a “charming bandit” by his former lawyer, the late Georges Kiejman, Pierre Goldman was born in Lyon, “of the brief relationship of two Polish Jewish resistance fighters, engaged within the Immigrant Workforce (ME) movement”, explain our colleagues. But at the end of the war, when the little boy was only a year old, his parents argued over where to raise him. As told Telerama, “Janka, the mother, wants to return to Poland to help build a communist state there. Alter, the father, refuses to allow his son to grow up in a Stalinist country, still marked by anti-Semitism”. To prevent this from happening, he therefore makes the radical decision to kidnap his son. “Pierre will not see his mother again until adolescence, and will be raised by his father and his new partner, Ruth”. Other children were born from this union, including Jean-Jacques Goldman in 1951.
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Pierre Goldman: an activist adolescence and a legal fight
It is impossible to know to what extent this kidnapping affected young Pierre. But from adolescence, his destiny takes shape. “A rebellious internal student, Pierre was expelled from several high schools (Évreux, Étampes, Compiègne), ended up obtaining a baccalaureate that he prepared alone, enrolled at the Sorbonne but always had difficulty fitting into the mold”, explain our colleagues. It was at university that he found his path: that of activism. Despite his father’s attempts to put him back in the ranks by suggesting he do his military service, Pierre Goldman became interested in guerrilla warfare and ended up engaging in banditry by increasing the number of robberies. Life choices which will lead him to be accused and tried for the double murder of a pharmacist and her preparer on Boulevard Richard-Lenoir in Paris. Despite his denials, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the first time on December 14, 1974, before receiving an acquittal on May 4, 1976, following the commitment of numerous public figures and intellectuals. Despite this legal victory, Jean-Jacques Goldman’s half-brother was shot dead in the street in 1979, just six days before the birth of his son Manuel.
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