The Making of a Terrorist

...He was accepted forthwith and returned to Paris to await instructions...

...according to Ber-trand Poirot-Delpech in Le Monde, it completes the "lyrical autobiography" begun with Memories...

...The student leader reacted very mildly: "He thought I was a madman living in a dream world...

...But Israel, like every other land, was alien to me...

...So, back to France, this time by way of Bogota, where he went "to a brothel, to six brothels, frantically, from the most sordid to the most luxurious...

...Goldman soon went back to Poland...

...He was attracted to the group that handled the physical struggle against anti-Communists on campus "because it seemed a way for me to escape the abject shame of mere theoretical debate...

...Unfortunate because the author will undoubtedly be linked in the minds of many with the current wave of terrorism, and he feels and wants to remain "fundamentally alien" to anything outside of himself...

...But Dim Memories does offer us startling insights into the complicated workings of a tortured mind...

...1 was deeply fascinated by the idea of an armed struggle in France...

...He robbed him anyhow, at gun point...

...Reviewed by Leo Sauvage Author, "Che Guevara," "The Oswald Affair" It is an unfortunate coincidence for Pierre Goldman that his book, which made its first impact on the French public and on French justice during the summer of 1975, should have reached American bookstores during the autumn of 1977...

...Both parents survived, but Mrs...

...Goldman did not make it to Cuba until 1967...

...We were not inactive, but we did not succeed in organizing a new guerrilla band, in saving armed struggle from the mortal decline into which it had fallen...

...Until 1965, Goldman's plan had been "to make a failure of my life...

...He was arrested on April 8, 1970, not for the three armed holdups he then admitted and describes, but for a double-murder in a Boulevard Rich-ard-Lenoir pharmacy that he strenuously denied...

...His idea was that "the government would counter this surprising violence with a military response and the situation would be beneficially aggravated, radicalized...

...He spent his time with black musicians in nightclubs, and managed to meet "women who knew the art of making love the way one dances the rhumba"—even in Castro's (and Che Guevara's) Havana...

...Pierre felt transported into "a world of splendid violence in which death and pleasure, united at last, assuaged the pain of mortality...

...Everything changed at the end of that summer, during a "fiesta" put on by a group of entertainers from Cuba: "I had a desire to go there and fight, and I felt that there it could be sweet to die...

...This is his alibi: "As a measure of security, of course, but also because even though I was still in Paris, I was already in Latin America...

...He sailed as a passenger on an East German freighter, and, he announces, "I loved Havana at once...

...In 1965, of course, unless he intended to fight Castro's regime, the only "extreme peril" he would have been exposed to in Cuba was the necessity of cutting cane for 10-12 hours a day...

...In this accusation," he writes, "I would be an absolute stranger...

...There was a moment," he adds, "when he looked at me and I think he realized that I was Jewish...

...I smiled at this terrible, hidden complicity we shared in the secrecy of our Jewishness...

...Indeed it gives us a kind of statement of aims, a profession de foi directly connecting Goldman's way of thinking with the mentality of the Baaders and the Meinhofs, who were non-Jewish Germans born in Germany: "My intention was to organize a group that would conduct urban guerrilla warfare...

...Two of the three sections of his book deal with the trial and the "Richard-Lenoir Affair...

...During the Six Day War, he met "two Jewish comrades, Marxist-Leninists and supposedly anti-Zionists, who slyly rejoiced in the power and military skill of Dayan's troops...

...He finally took action, going to see one of the student leaders and proposing "to move up to a real, serious act of violence, to open fire on the security forces...

...A new trial exonerated him of the major charge on November 20, 1975, and on October 5, 1976, he was released from the jail where he had been serving a concurrent 12-year sentence for the robberies...

...Goldman's book is certainly not "a book of love," as a Jean-Marc Theol-leyre wrote in Le Monde...

...In 1977, though, when curiosity about the personal motivations of terrorists is intense, the reader is necessarily drawn to the autobiographical part of his not-so-dim memories for what it reveals of the stuff certain urban terrorists are made from...

...He is not much better a revolutionary than he is a Jew: Although he was in Paris during the student uprising of May 1968, "1 held aloof from it...

...He recently published a second book, a novel...

...Most of all, he considers it "scandalous" that he should appear "as a mirror, a symbol of our generation...

...Goldman, a French radical who was jailed from 1970-76 for three armed robberies he confessed to and a double-murder he was ultimately cleared of, even complains about the activity of some Leftist groups in his behalf: "It meant that I was once again dispossessed of my identity...

...Pierre Goldman does not believe he is French and he is sure he is not Polish, but he seems eager to proclaim his Jewishness...

...What did Goldman do...

...I was too much a Jew to take root in any given soil...

...Of course," he grants, "to commit a holdup was not to go into combat," but there was the possibility of an encounter with the police, and "the thought of gunfire in the streets of Paris plunged me into an agitated reverie...

...Goldman's "horror of the condition of being a student" (his French is sometimes quite poor, but is seldom as bad as his translator's English) did not prevent him from taking part in political activities at the university, getting "trained...

...The son of two Polish Jews who were members of the Communist underground, Goldman was born in Lyon (often called the capital of the Resistance) in 1944, the last and most ferocious year of the Occupation...

...We would commit holdups, kidnap important personages (I was thinking of certain writers, among others) occupy buildings for a short time in lightning fashion (lecture halls, for example), attack policemen and police stations, without opening fire, to steal their weapons and procure our own...

...Thus when he decided to rob a clothing store near the Madeleine owned by a man named Dreyfus, he was "troubled about having to rob a Jew" and worried about "committing a sacrilegious act...

...Goldman also met a Venezuelan "revolutionary," and told him he was "available for any adventure, provided it would plunge me into an authentic, historic confrontation...

...In 1975, his book could still be read primarily for its strange combination of Caryl Chessman's legal sophistication and Jean Genet's exhibitionistic morbidity...

...Strangely, the city he describes resembles the Batista Havana of 10 years before...

...the desire to make it a success inspired me with deep disgust...

...In my mind, in my flesh, Israel was only another country in the Jewish Diaspora, another place of exile...

...Pierre grew up with a father he loved and admired, and a stepmother about whom there is just one mysterious, not at all antagonistic, sentence in the whole book...

...When, in the next paragraph, he tries to find some better reasons, he almost sounds like Raymond Aron: "Something unwholesome, a hysterical symptom...

...After studying somewhat fitfully in various schools (and being expelled from one), he managed to pass his baccalaureate examinations and register at the Sorbonne...

...Nor is it at all "lyrical," as Poirot-Delpech would have it, even though the author tries in vain to imitate Albert Camus' L'Etranger...

...Once in Paris, Goldman knew what he wanted to do: mastermind a series of holdups, using West Indians as accomplices...

...Anything else...

...And so, "sadly, I abandoned my plans...

...While he did not "repudiate that solidarity," he "suffocated in their warm embrace" and "suffered from it as from an intrusion of my icy, inward solitude...

...I admit it, I confess it, I say it in writing: I didn't care...

...The one reassuring note here is that when Goldman communicated these views to "a few political friends," they looked at him as the student leader did, "the way one looks at a lunatic...

...Also, I had a need to experience the pleasure of hearing this music in a state of extreme peril, precisely while leading a life haunted and heightened by a real threat of death...

...Masturbating games to satisfy their desire for history...

...in the subtleties of Marxist debate," and organizing a "security unit" for the Union of Communist students...

...He has little to tell about the 14 months he spent in Venezuela: "We failed...

...In the interim he became a draft evader, although France was involved in no war, and traveled extensively in Eastern and Western Europe, Mexico and the United States...

...I wanted to rip apart, to smash the peaceful course of political relations in this country, to introduce violence, to provoke it...

...they succeeded in calling into question the validity of his conviction—and life sentence—for the double-murder...

...I did not know the exact content of the political line of the group to which I belonged," Goldman boasts...

...This war meant nothing to me, even though I was, in a way, deeply involved in it and followed it with the greatest interest...

...That hurt...