Queer Places:
Columbia University (Ivy League), 116th St and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
Holy Blossom Memorial Park Scarborough, Toronto Municipality, Ontario, Canada
David
Benjamin Rakoff (November 27, 1964 – August 9, 2012) was a Canadian-born
American writer based in New York City, who was noted for his humorous and
sometimes autobiographical non-fiction essays. Rakoff was an essayist,
journalist, and actor, and a regular contributor to WBEZ's 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.[1]
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.[2][3]
Rakoff has said that he and his siblings were close as children.[2][4]
Rakoff's mother, Gina Shochat-Rakoff, is a doctor who has practised
psychotherapy and his father, Vivian Rakoff, is a psychiatrist.[5]
Rakoff has written that almost every generation of his family fled from one
place to another.[6]
Rakoff's grandparents, who were Jewish, fled Latvia and Lithuania at the turn
of the 20th century and settled in South Africa.[6]
The Rakoff family left South Africa in 1961, for political reasons, and moved
to Montreal for seven years.[7]
In 1967, when he was three, Rakoff's family relocated to Toronto.[8]
As an adult, he said that he identified as Jewish.[9]
Rakoff attended high school at the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, and
graduated in 1982. That year, he moved to New York City to attend Columbia
University, where he majored in East Asian Studies and studied dance.[7]
Rakoff spent his third year of college at the School of Oriental and African
Studies in London and graduated in 1986. He worked in Japan as a translator
with a fine arts publisher. His work was interrupted after four months when,
at age 22, he became ill with Hodgkin's disease, a form of lymphatic cancer
which he has referred to as "a touch of cancer". He returned to Toronto for 18
months of treatment, including chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery.
From 1982, Rakoff lived in the United States (minus his four-month stay in
Japan in 1986), first as a student, then as a resident alien. In the early
1990s he was issued a green card, a subject about which he wrote in one of his
early newspaper articles.[6]
After living in the United States for 21 years, Rakoff was motivated by a
desire to participate in the political process and applied for U.S.
citizenship.[10]
Rakoff chronicled the experience of becoming an American citizen in an essay
published in Don't Get Too Comfortable.. He became a U.S. citizen in
2003, while at the same time retaining his Canadian citizenship.
In 2010, while writing the book Half Empty, Rakoff was diagnosed
with a malignant tumor and Hodgkin's lymphoma, and later developed a
post-radiation sarcoma behind his left collarbone and began chemotherapy.[11][12]
He died in Manhattan on August 9, 2012.[13]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rakoff