In 2004, Ian Parker wrote about altruism and the fascinating case of a philanthropist who felt compelled to donate one of his kidneys to a stranger.
Last summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi.
Kravinsky’s father, Irving, who is now eighty-nine, was born in Russia to a Jewish family, which immigrated to America when he was a boy. A tank commander in the Second World War, he was a socialist whose faith in the Soviet Union was extinguished only after that country no longer existed.
In 1971, Kravinsky won a scholarship to Dartmouth. He majored in Asian studies, wrote poetry, took up meditation, and grew his hair long. Soon after graduation, Kravinsky returned to Philadelphia, where he got a job at an insurance company. He began a relationship with a co-worker there, and moved in with her; the match lasted less than a year, but it had the side effect of introducing Kravinsky to real estate.
In 1984, Kravinsky was devastated by the death of Adria, the elder of his two sisters, from lung cancer. She was thirty-three; Zell was thirty. “She was the only person in my family who liked me in any meaningful way,” Kravinsky said, describing the guilt he still feels for not showing her enough affection, and for not persuading her to quit smoking. “We were close, but there were so many things that kept me from spending more time with her. I wish I could go back.
By 1994, he had decided to give up on an academic career. Instead, he would make a living in real estate. Kravinsky said that his wife was skeptical. “She said I’d become a bum,” he told me.
“Most people think the more you borrow the riskier it is,” Kravinsky has said. “In my system, the more you borrow the safer it is.” Kravinsky made full use of the tax advantages of commercial-real-estate investments: in the eyes of the I.R.S., a shopping mall depreciates in value, like an office chair, and one can set that depreciation against income tax, overlooking the fact that a mall, over time, is likely to increase in value.
In 2002, Zell and Emily gave an eighty-seven-thousand-square-foot apartment building to a school for the disabled in Philadelphia. The same year, they gave two gifts, worth $6.2 million, to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. The gifts were partly in the form of a distribution center, four condominiums, three houses, and a parking lot; Kravinsky placed them in a fund named for his late sister, Adria.
He invited me into a house crowded with stuff, including a treadmill in the middle of the living room. He cleared away enough books and toys for me to sit down on a sofa. His daughter, who is nine, came into the room to say hello, but when Emily Kravinsky came home, a moment later, she walked straight past us into the kitchen, taking the girl with her. Kravinsky followed. He came back after a few minutes and picked up his coat, and as we left the house he said, “She wants us out of here.
These contrasting discourses have one clear point of contact. In our conversations, Kravinsky showed an almost rhapsodic appreciation of ratios. In short, ratios are dependable and life is not. “No number is significant in itself: its only significance is in relation to other numbers,” he said. “I try to rely on relationships between numbers, because those relationships are constant—unlike Billy Crudup and the woman he impregnated.
In the late nineties, by coincidence, two donors independently approached two hospitals with a request to make a nondirected kidney donation, and neither hospital could think of a good reason for turning them away. Joyce Roush, a transplant nurse from Indiana, introduced herself to Lloyd Ratner, a leading transplant surgeon then at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. “I was quite skeptical,” Ratner told me. “I said, ‘Give me a call and we’ll consider,’ thinking she’d never call me.
In a now famous 1972 essay, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” the Australian philosopher Peter Singer set up the ethical puzzle that has become known as the Shallow Pond and the Envelope. In the first case, a child has fallen into a shallow pond and is drowning; Singer considers saving the child, and reflects on the inconvenience of muddy clothes. In the second, he is asked by the Bengal Relief Fund to send a donation to save the lives of children overseas.
He discussed the idea of kidney donation with his family and friends. “I thought, at first, that people would understand,” Kravinsky told me. “But they don’t understand math. That’s an American pastime—grossly misunderstanding math. I’ve had to repeat it over and over. Some people eventually got it. But many people felt the way my wife did: she said, ‘No matter how infinitesimal the risk to your family, we’re your family, and the recipient doesn’t count.
During one of our conversations, I asked Kravinsky to calculate a ratio between his love for his children and his love for unknown children. Many people would refuse to engage in this kind of thought experiment, but Kravinsky paused for only a moment. “I don’t know where I’d set it, but I would not let many children die so my kids could live,” he said.
In April, 2003, Kravinsky called the Albert Einstein Medical Center, an inner-city hospital where he could be fairly confident that a donated kidney would go to a low-income African-American patient. Kravinsky told me that the transplant coördinator who spoke to him was “pretty leery of the whole thing, and kept telling me there was no payment.” The hospital had never operated on a nondirected donor. But he went there to meet a surgeon, who believed Kravinsky’s reports of two Ph.D.
The next morning, Kravinsky called his wife from his hospital bed. Because of his digestive complications, he had to be taken off opiate-based painkillers, and he says that he took nothing in their place. Zell asked Emily for help: “She was furious. She didn’t want me to die, but, on the other hand, she was beyond human rage.” She said that she was willing to talk to the doctors about his treatment. She also threatened to divorce him.
Having redefined his life as a continuing donation, but having given away everything that came immediately to hand, Kravinsky was not sure how to proceed. His utilitarian and romantic selves were now in competition, and he did not trust his ability to distinguish between the two, or to distinguish between them and vanity. He saw a baffling choice between engagement and disengagement, between creating wealth and withdrawing into a life of poverty.
He called me when he got home, a few hours later. “Oh, brother, she’s in bad shape,” he said of the would-be recipient. He said that “everyone had liked each other” at the meeting, and an agreement had been reached. The recipient would take a kidney from whichever of the two women was a better match: both would present themselves to a hospital as friends offering a donation. The sick woman had agreed to pay fifty thousand dollars for the organ.
Indeed, near the end of last year, Kravinsky had begun talking to a local venture capitalist; together they planned a real-estate partnership that would invest on behalf of others in the kind of commercial property that Kravinsky had experience buying and selling. He would give his half of the shares to charity. Other charities could invest without paying fees.
“But don’t you think giving away forty-five million dollars was a good first step?” Barry Katz asked him, taking up the challenge of having moral absolutism as a weekend house guest.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Warby Parker eyewear to open its first location on Cleveland’s west sideThe eyewear company already has an East Side location at the Pinecrest development in Orange Village. Now, they'll be on the West Side at Crocker Park too.
Read more »
Sarah Jessica Parker on what she really thinks of And Just Like ThatShe opened up with her costars Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon
Read more »
Chicago's Candace Parker voted AP Female Athlete of Year for 2nd timeThe 35-year-old Parker staved off Father Time to help the Chicago Sky win the franchise’s first WNBA championship and capped off 2021 by being named The Associated Press’ Female Athlete of the Year for a second time.
Read more »
Fans have discovered a throwback of Sarah Jessica Parker and Cynthia Nixon 16 years before they starred in SATCThey knew each other way before SATC
Read more »