Natacha Atlas - Early Life

Early Life

Atlas was born to a father of Moroccan, Egyptian, and Palestinian ancestry who was born in Jerusalem and a British mother who had converted to Islam. Her paternal grandfather was born in Egypt, but grew up in Palestine, immigrating to Europe at age 15. She concedes to being "maybe 10 percent Jewish or something." Atlas says the claim that her father is purely Jewish and not Arab is "one of those things where someone had a grudge against me and wanted to hurt me. My great-great-grandfather was Jewish. But Jews have always been part of Arab society, so it’s not so unusual for someone to find out that they have Jewish blood. At the end of the day, we really are so connected."

Atlas grew up in Laken, a neighborhood of Brussels, Belgium with a large Moroccan population. After her parents separated, Atlas went to live in Northampton, England with her mother. Atlas learned several languages, including Arabic, French, English, and Spanish, and has used them all in the course of her career.

Read more about this topic:  Natacha Atlas

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:

    ... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    His life was a sort of dream, as are most lives with the mainspring left out.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)