Jean-Jacques Goldman: his rare secrets on the tragic story of his mother

During the first confinement, in 2020, high school students from Montpellier interviewed 8 celebrities about their feelings about the health crisis. An initiative that gave birth to a 126-page book, Stars and high school students, of which the sale of 1,000 copies raised nearly €9,000 in profits for the Hérault Red Cross. The book, currently out of stock, thus houses exclusive interviews with Julien Clerc, Francis Cabrel, Patrick Bruel, Jane Fonda, Mark Harmon (NCIS), Sophie Marceau, Pierre Richard and Jean-Jacques Goldman. The presence of the author-composer in the work is also a great feat, since the latter has completely vanished from the media sphere for several years. Asked by high school students about confinement, Jean-Jacques Goldman then indulged in a few secrets about his mother, Ruth, who died in 2008.I thought a lot about my mother who had to flee her native country, Germany, in 1933, at the age of 12. She had learned French at school, which she loved, and then the war came. She had to ‘confine’ herself in a small village with her parents, it lasted four years… Four years without school, without friends, without Internet, little news, with the daily fear of being denounced and arrested”remembers the artist before adding: “But the liberation arrived, she was finally able to go out, work, fall in love, raise three children, live a good life, and even passed her baccalaureate… at 70 years old!

Jean-Jacques Goldman: “We thought life was simple”

Concerning today’s youth, Jean-Jacques Goldman explains: “My generation has been very spared from existence, but yours is facing a real test, this virus. We thought life was simple, and that Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan were on another planet… But we were wrong; Human life has always been complicated and dangerous…”