David "Noodles" Aaronson is a fictional character who is the protagonist of the 1952 novel The Hoods by Harry Grey, and of the book's 1984 film adaptation,[1] Once Upon a Time in America,[2][3][4] where he was portrayed by Robert De Niro.
According to the novel and film in which he appears, David "Noodles" Aaronson is born in either 1903 or 1904 into poverty in a Jewish enclave in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
In 1918, when Noodles is age 14 or 15, he forms a gang with his friends Phillip "Cockeye" Stein, Patrick "Patsy" Goldberg and a young Italian boy named Dominic.
Together the group "rolls" (robs) drunks in a bar run by local Irish-American mobster Bugsy, whose protection racket they help maintain.
The two cross paths later, become friends, and together blackmail a policeman, forcing him to pay for their times with a local prostitute and to cover up their crimes.
He visits the mausoleum where his friends' bodies were moved and discovers a plaque dedicated to them by him (something he had not done) and a key to the same money locker he had found empty in 1933.
He also learns that Max faked his own death in the shootout with help from the Syndicate, killed his friends for that purpose, stole the money and became "Bailey", a very rich man currently under investigation for corruption.
Noodles feels happiness after this event and is at peace with his past now, being able to move on with his life from now on, without having to look back anymore.
Film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that the character of Noodles, as an underworld Hamlet, develops through the story to become one of its two heroes.
[2] In Cinema and Multiculturalism, it is offered that while the story Once Upon a Time in America is ostensibly about the "children of immigrants scraping the bottom of the American melting pot" and about "Jewish criminal kingpin David "Noodles" Aaronson, who dreams of greatness 'once upon a time', and spends the rest of his days wondering why his salad days wilted", they offer that the film is more "about time itself, and how Noodles learns that it's more important to make sense of your life, your own history".