Lionel Rocheman

Origins and early life

Lionel Rocheman was born in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris on 18 June 1928, in a Jewish family of Polish origin, and died in the twentieth on 30 July 2020, at ninety-two.

Work and career

He was in the resistance at sixteen, and remained all his life a member of the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees of France, the association of those whose parents did not come back. He was a musician, singer, actor, writer and theatre producer, and his lasting act was a simple one: in 1964 he founded and ran the Hootenanny at the American Center in Paris, a weekly open stage where anyone could get up and play. It lasted nearly twelve years and became the incubator of the French folk revival — Alan Stivell and Claude Lemesle among many others were first heard there — and in 1970 the Académie Charles-Cros gave its records the Grand Prix.

He sang the Yiddish repertoire as well, and kept it in circulation in a France where its speakers had been murdered; the same man who gathered the young French folk singers of the 1960s was carrying songs from a world that no longer existed.