David Rakoff

David Benjamin Rakoff was a Canadianborn American writer based in New York City, who was noted for his humorous and sometimes autobiographical nonfiction essays. Rakoff was an essayist, journalist, and actor, and a regular contributor to WBEZs This American Life. Rakoff described himself as a New York writer who also happened to be a Canadian writer, a mega Jewish writer, a gay writer, and an East Asian Studies major who has forgotten most of his Japanese writer.

David Rakoff was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the youngest of three children. His brother, the comedian Simon Rakoff, is four years older than David. Their sister, Ruth Rakoff, author of the cancer memoir When My World Was Very Small, is the middle child. Rakoff has said that he and his siblings were close as children. Rakoffs mother, Gina ShochatRakoff, is a doctor who has practised psychotherapy and his father, Vivian Rakoff, is a psychiatrist. Rakoff has written that almost every generation of his family fled from one place to another. Rakoffs grandparents, who were Jewish, fled Latvia and Lithuania at the turn of the 20th century and settled in South Africa. The Rakoff family left South Africa in 1961, for political reasons, and moved to Montreal for seven years. In 1967, when he was three, Rakoffs family relocated to Toronto. As an adult, he said that he identified as Jewish.

Source: Wikipedia