'Goldman Case' is the story of a French Jewish radical with a strange trial

(JTA) – Pierre Goldman was a legendary figure in 1970s France – a left-wing intellectual, a criminal, a child of the Holocaust, and a man accused of murders that remain shrouded in mystery to this day .

“The Goldman Case,” a French courtroom drama that focuses on Goldman’s 1976 murder retrial, has put him back in the spotlight. The film premiered on the Cannes Film Festival in 2023 and became a hit in France, where Jewish actor Arieh Worthalter won a César Award – the French equivalent of the Oscar – for his portrayal of Goldman.

The film recently made its U.S. debut in New York City and Los Angeles and is now playing in theaters nationwide, giving American viewers the opportunity to delve into a French Jewish mystery that resonates into the present.

Director Cédric Kahn was first drawn to Goldman by his 1975 memoir, “Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France.” Goldman wrote the book in prison. He had been convicted of four armed robberies, including a 1969 pharmacy robbery that ended in the deaths of two women, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Goldman confessed to the burglaries but vehemently denied killing the pharmacists.

The book traced Goldman’s life of violence and self-torture to the burdens of his past. He was born in June 1944 to Polish Jewish parents who took part in the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France. At the end of World War II, his parents separated and his mother planned to take him back to Poland. But his father kidnapped the baby to raise him in France – and to keep him away from the country where three million Jews were murdered.

Director Cedric Kahn on the set of ”The Goldman Case.” (credit: Menemsha Films/Moonshaker)

Goldman grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, filled with anger, guilt and a drive to emulate his parents’ revolutionary heroism. (“I wanted to be like them, to know that atmosphere of rebellion, that pride and honor,” says the character Goldman in the film. “I also wanted to be a Jewish warrior, to free myself from the stigma of being a Jew. “)

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency will screen “The Goldman Case” online on December 3. Register for tickets and a conversation with Oscar-winning star Arthur Harari.

That desire took him from a communist student association to… Cubawhere his help was rejected by communist guerrillas, and to Venezuela, where he joined a guerrilla group too late to be part of a revolution. His idealism led to theft, including a major bank robbery in Venezuela. Back in Paris, he quickly squandered the money on booze, expensive restaurants and crisp shirts. (“I sweat a lot and hate doing laundry,” the character tells the judge.)

While readily admitting his failures, Goldman insisted he would never kill innocent people.

“I think when he’s charged with murder, it’s a stain on his father, his mother, on himself,” Worthalter said in an interview. “He is morally driven as much by fighting for his innocence as he is by fighting for his parents’. To me there was a real connection between the accusation against him and the name Goldman.

Stay up to date with the latest news!

Subscribe to the Jerusalem Post newsletter

Goldman’s memoirs were praised by French celebrities and members of the intelligentsia, such as actress Simone Signoret and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. That praise, along with new evidence and inconsistencies from his first trial, led to the high-profile retrial recreated in “The Goldman Case.”

Kahn and screenwriter Nathalie Herzberg, themselves French Jews whose parents were “children of the Shoah,” reconstructed the trial using newspaper articles and interviews with Goldman’s lawyers. (France forbids filming or photographing trials.) They took some liberties, such as combining elements of the two trials, but also reproduced entire speeches word for word. The film relies heavily on those speeches; it takes place almost entirely in the courtroom, without music or flashbacks, to put the viewer in the seat of a juror.

“The Goldman Case” is not just about one man’s struggle to forge his destiny from the rubble of history. The Goldman trial exposed deep fault lines in French society in the 1970s. The student uprisings of 1968 were over and radical left movements breathed their last – but many social issues remained wide open, including inequality, racial bias within the police and legal systems, and the polarization between the liberal Parisian intelligentsia and the more conservative population from Paris. The small towns of France.

Problems that came to light during the process

All of these issues come to light during the process. Goldman, who has always lived among black people, mainly from the West Indies – including his wife, Guadeloupean-born Christiane Succab-Goldman (played by Chloé Lecerf) – speaks of the experience of Jewish and black people as a united struggle. He declares that the French police are racist and even goes so far as to accuse them of a “conspiracy,” which sounds far-fetched until one black witness after another testifies about police officers beating or intimidating them to incriminate Goldman.

Meanwhile, prosecutor Henri-René Garaud (Nicolas Briançon) evokes a deep distrust of liberal “elites” and outsiders that will sound familiar to today’s audiences, especially those who have heard politicians promise to return countries to their true patriots. “I will speak in the name of France, the real France, that of the workers and honest people, the country in whose name justice is done,” says the character Garaud in his closing argument.

Kahn said echoes of current politics became apparent to him while making the film.

“I didn’t think I would make a film that would be a sociological portrait of France, a France that has always been there,” he said. “On the one hand, there has always been this kind of native France: French people who claim that they belong to the country. But we also know that France is a country of immigration, and that there have always been conflicts between the two.”

A year after the movie came out Francethe country held parliamentary elections. The first round of elections was dominated by the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally party, whose founders include convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen and former Nazi Waffen-SS commander Pierre Bousequet. The second round went towards a left-wing coalition, which included the far-left party France Unbowed – recently accused of dismissing the threat of anti-Semitism in France.

This rift between far-right and far-left political movements bears similarity to the microcosm captured in the courtroom scene of “The Goldman Case,” Kahn said – as does the fraught debate over how to speak about anti-Semitism, racism and the history of Jews. and immigrants in France.

Goldman has a role in the film: his lawyer Georges Kiejamn (played by Arthur Harari, who also co-wrote the Oscar-winning courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall”). Kiejman is also a Polish Jew, born in France and raised poor. But where Goldman is a radical agitator who passionately proclaims his identity, Kiejman is a pragmatic centrist who says his Jewishness is “irrelevant” and presents a careful and calculated defense based on introducing doubt.

While Goldman descended into a life of crime, Kiejman rose to establishment success, eventually becoming Attorney General after the trial. They observe each other with suspicion, rivalry, and sometimes contempt: before the trial even begins, Goldman tries to fire Kiejman in a letter calling him an “armchair Jew,” presumably implying some kind of Jewish passivity. (The real letter was provided to Kahn by Goldman’s other lawyer, André Chouraqui.)

The character Kiejman responds, “How dare he?” Who does he think I am? I had to work hard to get here… He’s the armchair Jew with his bestseller and left-wing groupies.’

“I think the antagonism between Goldman and Kiejman tells us a lot about being Jewish, and not just in France — I think it’s quite universal,” Kahn said. “Pierre Goldman believes he carries within him a tragedy from which he cannot free himself, while Kiejman wants to emancipate himself from that tragedy by integrating.”

”The Goldman Case” focuses on the 1976 retrial of revolutionary leftist Pierre Goldman, above, previously convicted of murdering two pharmacists during an armed robbery. (credit: WIKIPEDIA)

However unwanted they may be, these two Jews shape each other. Kiejman takes a meticulous approach to Goldman’s defense and ultimately acquits him of the murder charge. And in Kiejman’s closing speech, after watching Goldman through the entire process, he finally speaks of their shared history: “The tragedy of the Eastern European Jews.”

“We both belong to the same community, that of Polish Jews, which French society has integrated while retaining the fears and deep wounds of its origins,” Kiejman says. “I ask you, if possible, to forget the effect his personality has on you, and not to judge him by his appearance. And I say honestly: we never recover from our childhood.”

After his murder conviction was overturned and after serving six years in prison, Goldman was released early in 1976. Three years later, under still unclear circumstances, he was shot and killed in Paris. More than 10,000 people attended the funeral. His killers were never found and the double murder of the pharmacists was never solved.

According to Kahn, Goldman’s murder became part of his legend. He wanted his film to keep the question marks behind Goldman. While Worthalter believed in Goldman’s innocence — he told JTA he had to in order to play the role — Kahn declined to take a stand.

“I find this story interesting because we don’t know,” he said. “There is a lot of mystery surrounding this story.”