- 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.
- Joffo also wrote Anna et son orchestre (Anna and Her Orchestra), which tells the story of Joseph's mother from the time she was 11 years old to the time she met Joseph Joffo's father in Paris.
- His novel Baby-foot, published in 1977, follows on from Un sac de billes and describes his life in Paris following World War II and his discovery of American values.
- On 10 December 1975, Un sac de billes premiered in France as a motion picture. The film was also released internationally under the title A Bag of Marbles.
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