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Profile 2 - David Freedman
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By Christine Hamelin with photography by Bernard Clark
 David
Freedman’s proficiency as a lawyer is largely due to his compassion
for others and his innate understanding of the disadvantaged. These
strengths, along with his ability to embrace change and move forward,
explain why, in the prime of his life, he seems so happy and fulfilled.
He was raised in North York, Toronto with his half-sister. The Jewish
community, a backdrop to his troubled home situation, was still
traumatized by the war. “My parents were born of immigrants
who came to Canada from Russia and Poland in the 1920s and ’30s,”
says David. Most of their relatives were killed in the war. “Many
people around us had survived the war and then come to Canada, or
had come to Canada before the war and had their whole families wiped
out.” One learned never to mention such things.
David’s early years weren’t easy. His family was dysfunctional,
and his mother, he realized much later, “had some fairly serious
mental health challenges.” He began working for his grandfather,
a glazier. He attended school full-time and excelled academically,
and then worked from 4 p.m. to midnight. At the beginning of Grade
11, David, then 16, left home. “I lived in a series of basement
apartments,” he says. Soon he left school. “I like to
say I’m the only person at Queen’s with no high school
diploma, a trade and an academic post!”
A tall, fit man, David speaks with a certain intensity. “My
teen years weren’t typical,” he notes. “The kids
at school were doing other things; I had the lifestyle of an older
person. It was hard to find a place for myself.” He sometimes
lived in slums and met up with some rough characters. . . .
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Profile Kingston and Summer in the City are divisions
of Riverview Publishing Inc.
© 2010 Profile Kingston/Summer in the City/Riverview Publishing
Inc. No reproduction or republication in whole or part without written
permission.
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