- Born
- Died
- Joseph Joffo was born on April 2, 1931 in Paris, France. He was an actor and writer, known for Un sac de billes (1975), A Bag of Marbles (2017) and The Origin of Violence (2016). He died on December 6, 2018 in Saint-Laurent-du-Var, Alpes-Maritimes, France.
- Hairdresser in Paris with a number of salons, he wrote his war memoirs for which he was helped stylistically by Claude Klotz. Un sac de billes became a bestseller.
- His memoir Un sac de billes (A Bag of Marbles), written as a novel, tells the story of Joffo as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust. When Joffo was ten, his father gave him and his brother five thousand francs each and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris by foot, train and bus, and join their brothers Henri and Albert in Menton on the Mediterranean coast, where they would be safe in Vichy France, unoccupied by the Nazis. The book "A Bag of Marbles" tells of this journey.
- He left school at 14 with a certificat d'études (a former school leaving certificate, taken at the end of primary education) in his pocket and joined his brothers in the family's barber shop.
- La Vieille dame de Djerba, published in 1984, was written after Joffo met a woman called Liza at a synagogue in Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia. He was amazed to discover, after assuming she was a beggar and offering her money, that she knew the names of his mother and grandmother.
- A second film of Un Sac de Billes was released in 2017, the crew having caused a frenzy during filming in Nice by hanging a Nazi flag from the Palais des Rois Sardes.
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