Pierre Goldman and the Beginnings of jeune litterature juive

Nolden, Thomas ""
French Forum - Volume 28, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 57-76
University of Nebraska Press

Excerpt

Very few Jewish writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed a reception comparable to that of the political activist, self-styled guerrilla, gangster, and author Pierre Goldman. In 1979, the assassination of the thirty-five year old Goldman by members of a right-wing commando provoked an outcry from the general public and prompted a reevaluation of the dangers of anti-Semitism among French Jews. The Marxist critic Régis Debray and the Jewish writer Hélène Cixous responded to Goldman's slaying by devoting entire books to the question of how his life and death came to challenge the very foundation of the grande nation. The novelist Catherine Axelrad suggested in her novel La Varsovienne (1990) that the circumstances of Goldman's murder—his killers had never been found and remained at large—enabled the extreme Left to offer quasi-national funerals for the revolution. More than 15,000 people attended his funeral, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Yves Montand, and many of the Jewish student leaders who never had gained Goldman's support. ¹

For many of his peers, the killing of the Jewish enfant terrible brought the issue of their own status and safety as outspoken Jews to the forefront. The journalist Luc Rosenzweig—a colleague of Goldman at Libération—took the event as incentive to conduct a series of interviews with young Jews, which he later published as La jeune France juive, a title sardonically alluding to Edouard Drumont's notorious anti-Semite pamphlet La France juive from 1886. According to Rosenzweig, the hors-la-loi Goldman became a martyr for those who, facing the choice between Judaism (particularism) and the University (universalism), chose the latter. ² Rosenzweig's collection of interviews came to stand as powerful homage to Goldman, not as a political extremist, but as a...