My mother was not famous and yet she felt her son was kind of famous. My life path and career in film – inspired, encouraged and nurtured by her – resulted in what I believe was the blueprint for her longevity and the absence of any kind of generation gap between us. A blueprint others could learn from.
Faye’s story is not uncommon for someone born in 1929. She was brought up in a Depression-era household in Montreal as the only daughter of a butcher trying to support five young children and his wife Sadie during the Second World War, who himself had arrived 15 years earlier escaping religious persecution in Eastern Europe. There was no money for a fancy education or prestigious employment but miraculously her father introduced her to culture wherever it could be found in Montreal in the 1930s.
What developed was the life lesson of how my mother erased the potential of any predictable generation gap that might have resulted in the typical friction of having a parent that might seem disconnected.