Early Life
Born Merrill Beth Nisker in Toronto, Ontario, she attended a private Jewish school where her classes were taught half in English and half in Hebrew. Nisker was a class clown, who "wasn't particularly smart. I was interested in creative performance stuff, but that turned out to be difficult for me because it was all so structured," she told Kitty Empire of The Observer.
Her family was culturally Jewish, though they were not religious. Her grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland; her paternal grandparents were from Galicia. In an interview in URB magazine, alongside Princess Superstar, she recounted how growing up she experienced antisemitism from local schoolchildren; on her walks home from school, students from a nearby Catholic school would throw stones at her and call her a "dirty Jew".
Before she became Peaches, Nisker was a music and drama teacher at Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto.
Read more about this topic: Peaches (musician)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the drivers seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structurethe webof society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)