Georges David Wolinski
BORN TUNIS, FRENCH TUNISIA, JUNE 29, 1934. DIED PARIS, JANUARY 7, 2015, AGED 80
THE VETERAN French cartoonist and writer Georges David Wolinski, murdered by jihadists at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, remained true to his Jewish identity all his life. His inspired visual images illustrated the French version of Dan Greenberg’s 1965 bestseller, How to be a Jewish Mother. .
Wolinski also worked with Algerianborn French lawyer Pierre-Philippe Barkats on a book in 2007, Thanks Hanukkah Harry, featuring the eponymous hero campaigning for climate change and other ecological issues.
During a life of political satire, Wolinksi co-founded the j ournal L’Enrage, with Jean-Jacques Pauvert and, Sine during the May 1968 student revolts in Paris, a period said to have deepened the traditional French sense of the absurd.
Wolinski’s parents were Jewish: his father Siegfried Wolinksi was from Poland and his mother Lola Bembaron was a Tunisian of Italian-descent.
Tragedy pursued him from the beginning to the end of his life. Having fled Europe’s pogroms, his father set up a business in Tunisia but was murdered in 1936 by an ex-employee, when Georges was two years old, provoking a move to France in 1945 . Wolinski told his wife Maryse that “the ghost of my father has haunted me all my life”.
Georges Wolinski — a long, creative life ended by suffering the same fate as his murdered father
After graduating in architecture, he spent his military service in a remote Algerian town in the Saharan desert. It may well have been a pivotal moment for the budding artist as there he encountered a poster by French-PolishJewish artist Roland Topor featuring the satirical monthly Hara-Kiri, precursor to Charlie Hebdo. The two were destined to become colleagues
Wolinski’s first cartoons appeared in Rustica in 1958, but the worlds of politics anderoticabeckonedandtwoyearslater he began drawing political cartoons.
In 1961, his comic strips and political and erotic cartoons appeared in HaraKiri, of which he became editor-in-chief until 1970, now working with the artist who first inspired him, Topor. His famous work, Paulette .C’Est la faute a la societé (It is society’s fault) was created in collaboration with the comic artist Georges Pichard in the early ’70s. Paulette first appeared in Charlie Mensuel, and courted controversy in France. His work also appeared in the daily, Liberation, the weekly, Paris-Match, L’Echo des Savanes and Charlie Hebdo.
In a moving tribute Wolinski’s daughter Elsa said: “I don’t think you can kill ideas”. Her father, she added, had brought her up to understand that his was a risky profession. She posted a photograph of his empty chair on Instagram.
Its poignant message features an office with a pen lying on a sheaf of papers beside a black notebook. Its caption reads: “Dad is gone, not Wolinksi”.
In 2012, he was the subject of his wife’s memoir, George, If You Only Knew. As a measure of the value France places on freedom of expression, Wolinski received his country’s highest decoration, the Lègion d’Honneur in 2005.
In the same year, he was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angouleme at the Angouleme Festival — the most prestigious prize for graphic art in the world.
It testifies to his daughter’s tribute — that ideas cannot be killed and that Georges Wolinski’s work has become a modern day classic.