David Rakoff

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David Rakoff (2006)

David Benjamin Rakoff (born November 27, 1964 in Montreal , † August 9, 2012 in Manhattan ) was a Canadian-American author and comedian.

Life

Rakoff's grandparents fled Latvia and Lithuania as Jews around the turn of the century and settled in South Africa. The family left the country in 1961 and moved to Montreal. In 1967 the family moved to Toronto .

Rakoff graduated from Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in 1982 . In the same year he moved to New York and began studying East Asian Studies and Dance at Columbia University . Rakoff spent a year abroad at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and graduated in 1986. In Japan, Rakoff worked as a translator; after four months, at the age of 22, he developed Hodgkin's lymphoma . In Toronto he underwent treatment for eighteen months.

In the early 1990s he received a green card , which he made the subject of one of his first newspaper articles. Since 1996 he has appeared 25 times on the well-known radio show and podcast This American Life and once represented the presenter Ira Glass after the death of his mother. In 2002 he received the Lambda Literary Award in the humor category for his book Fraud . In 2003 he received US citizenship in addition to his Canadian citizenship.

In 2010, while he was writing Half Empty , Rakoff was discovered to have a malignant tumor behind his collarbone and he began chemotherapy . He died on August 9, 2012.

In 2013, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish was published posthumously , a verse novel in anapaestic tetrameters , which he was able to record  as an audio book in the NPR studio of This American Life with the help of Ira Glass before his death .

Awards

Works

  • Fraud: essays . Doubleday, New York 2001. ( Ger .: Gelogen! München; Zurich: Diana-Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-453-86987-7 )
  • Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems . Doubleday, New York 2005.
  • Half empty . Doubleday, New York 2010.
  • Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish . Doubleday, 2013.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Rakoff, David, "about men: extraordinary alien" , The New York Times , October 9, 1994. Accessed January 20, 2010.
  2. ↑ Rakoff, David, "about men: extraordinary alien" , The New York Times , October 9, 1994. Accessed January 20, 2010. See also Walters, Juliet, "Just for Laughs: just for lunch: writer David Rakoff on Schwartz's, ethics, and comedy " ( August 16, 2002 memento on the Internet Archive ), Montreal Mirror , 2007. Retrieved January 20, 2010.
  3. ↑ https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/472/our-friend-david , last accessed on August 18, 2017
  4. ^ Interview on the Daily Show , October 14, 2010
  5. ↑ Rakoff: David Rakoff in "This American Life: The Invisible Made Visible" . Retrieved August 19, 2012.
  6. ^ Margalit Fox: David Rakoff, 47, Comic Essayist, Dies . In: The New York Times , August 10, 2012. Retrieved August 14, 2012. 
personal data
SURNAME Rakoff, David
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rakoff, David Benjamin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American comedian
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Montreal
DATE OF DEATH August 9, 2012
Place of death Manhattan