David Freedman - Legacy

Legacy

According to his son, David Noel Freedman, it is unlikely that contemporary audiences would appreciate most of David Freedman's work (though his jokes about the stock market still ring true), because most of his jokes played on the peculiarities and sensitivities of his era. Freedman’s stories, however, have a timeless quality. As the years passed, his family honored his memory with the posthumous publication of The Intellectual Lover (1940, repr. 2007), a collection of short stories that were originally published individually between 1922 and 1928.

Of the countless pieces Freedman wrote between 1920 and 1936, Mendel, Inc. (1929) is the only fully realized play. A product of the beginning of his brief career, it embodies the mature thoughts of a humorist/playwright. On June 2, 2004, this classic comedy about an immigrant Jewish family living in the uncertain times of 1929 of the Lower East Side was read to a packed house at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, California. Mendel, Inc. was also used as the basis for the 1932 Warner Brothers film The Heart of New York. a vehicle for Jewish-dialect comedians Smith and Dale, with comedian George Sidney as the pivotal character, Mendel Marantz.

Four books by Freedman were translated into Russian and published by Ogonyok in 1926; they enjoyed tremendous popularity for a short while, and Mendel's witty "definitions" were quoted everywhere, but within a year they were eclipsed by the comic writings of Ilf and Petrov and Mikhail Zoshchenko, and were soon forgotten, although Anatoly Rybakov has a character quote Mendel in Children of the Arbat (set in 1933). His novel "Mendel Marantz" was republished as an audiobook in Russian in 2011, narrated by noted actors Klara Novikova, Leonid Kanevsky and others.

A fictionalized version of David Freedman appears as "Harry Goldhandler" in the novel Inside, Outside by Herman Wouk.