October 24, 1986, was Aubrey Drake Graham’s birthday.
Raised in Toronto, Ontario, by his mother, he was “very poor” growing up.
Drake had previously dubbed his mother, a teacher, “godlike,” but due to a number of health problems, she was forced to live in bed. “She smoked cigarettes and took her pаin meds, deteriorating every day, essentially dying,” Drake remembered to GQ.
Drake has also talked about growing up in the upscale suburb of Forest Hill, but he also says he was “very poor, like broke.”
“On Weston Road, I was raised. That’s in the vicinity of the city’s west end. It’s not the world’s most picturesque place. In 2011, he said to Complex, “I grew up there.” “In the sixth grade, I relocated to Forest Hill. Thus, I was not raised in Forest Hill.”
“It so happens that my mother is Jewish. Her family was her first priority. He went on, “She got us a part of a house we could live in. It was neither opulent nor large. That was our means of subsistence.”
Drake has also mentioned his Jewish ancestry with pride.
In behind-the-scenes film from his “HYFR” music video, which was intended to be a recreation of his boyhood Bar Mitzvah, Drake said, “I’m proud, a proud young Jewish boy.”
“My parents didn’t have much money when I had my Bar Mitzvah in the past. We kind of just did it in an Italian restaurant’s basement, which is kind of like a faux pas, he clarified, according to Digital Spy. “I promised myself that I would have a re-Bar Mitzvah if I ever became wealthy. That is the idea of the video.”
Even as a young child, Drake went to a Jewish day school “where nobody understood what it was like to be Black and Jewish,” he revealed in an interview with Һeeb magazine in 2010.