Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
16 August 2004

Giving away most of his $45m fortune was not enough for Zell Kravinsky – he gave away one of his kidneys too, to a black woman who was a stranger to him and who would probably otherwise have died. His was one of only ‘several dozen’ nondirected kidney donations made each year in the US. The more I read this New Yorker article about Kravinsky the more admiration I feel for him and the more it saddens me that he seems to be painted largely as a crank. He seems to have been inspired by Peter Singer whose influential essay, Famine, Affluence, and Morality pointed out (to my mind convincingly) that there is no moral difference between failing to save a child who is drowning in a shallow pond right in front of you and failing to give money to charity that would help to save a child’s life in Bangladesh. Moreover it is hard to establish a moral difference between one’s responsibility to one’s family and friends and the same responsibility to any other person in need. (I am not at all persuaded incidentally by Singer’s next step which is to suggest that All Animals are Equal and therefore, ‘ that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species’).

I do believe (uncomfortably) that I should really be living at a minimum comfort level and the rest of my money should be going to those who need it in the third world. Like most people however I would have great difficulty living according to that principle and accordingly I put it to the back of my mind and try to do what I can within the limits of ‘normal’ behaviour. That makes me all the more filled with admiration for one of the few people who seems to be making a serious, conscientious attempt to live according to those principles (albeit imperfectly – he and his family are not living a millionaire lifestyle but neither are they ‘living poor’).

More coverage of his story from The Daily Telegraph.

1 Comment »

  1. Although Zell Kravinsky amassed a multi-million dollar fortune in the 1990s, he and his wife and children lived in a house in Jenkintown, PA worth approximately “two hundred thirty eight thousand dollars,” during that period according to Ian Parker of The New Yorker.

    The Telegraph UK writes: “his family lives in a tumbledown and untidy ‘row house’ that he bought for $141,000 in 1996”. The New Yorker also describes Zell’s house as “a wooded shingle house with a broken photocopier on the front porch and a tangle of bicycles, tricycles and wagons…crowded with stuff, including a treadmill in the living room, books and toys on the sofa.”

    Back when this all started, The Kravinskys didn’t want to spoil their children, but they did want to do something good for the world—to set a positive example for their children. So they began giving away their millions of dollars to charities, mostly in the areas of public health. In an interview with CNN, Zell Kravinsky said “we don’t want our kids to be rich, because that — not only does it spoil them, but it gives them a mistaken impression of the world. So our idea was to leave them the legacy of philanthropy.”

    During an interview with PCN, Zell said: “Most people wish happiness as the number one value for their kids, but I wish that they’d be good…I want them to be good and I want them to be useful.”

    Some would call The Kravinskys frugal. Fir example, Zell has refused to spend money on things such as broken toilets—why fix one if there were three working in the house? The cost of the repair could feed a homeless man for a week. But did Emily agree with Zell in his frugality or was she at odds with her husband? Ian Parker of The New Yorker writes: “Emily was certainly complicit in the family’s frugality, but she became frustrated by Zell’s refusal to spend money.”

    Despite the fact that all the charity the Kravinskys gave was in Emily’s name as well as Zell’s [“the gifts were made…in her name”, according to The New Yorker], she clearly she wasn’t on board with the extremity of Zell’s philanthropic quest. As cited in Ian Parker’s story in The New Yorker, a friend of Kravinsky explains Emily’s complicity away by saying: “My impression is she didn’t want to be made out a Scrooge.” So she didn’t want to be the one to force her husband to quit giving.

    Ian Parker of The New Yorker writes: “Even as he became rich, he was arguing at home against buying two minivans to replace a 1985 Toyota Camry.” Ian Parker also writes, “The children did not get pocket money, and Emily had to fight to get the front porch repaired.” Ian Parker quoted Zell as saying: “She thought it was crazy to give everything away…”

    Apparently in order to alleviate his wife’s fears about going broke and hurting the family (fears Zell presumably shared), Ian Parker of The New Yorker notes: “Kravinsky had put some money aside…established trust funds for his wife, his children.”

    But despite the tension in the house surrounding Zell’s philanthropic quest, Kravinsky didn’t stop his actions. In fact, he raised the stakes, becoming obsessed with the idea of donating one of his superfluous kidneys (human beings have two, but only need one to survive) to save someone’s life—an idea he got while reading a story about altruistic organ donation in The Wall Street Journal.

    When he tried to talk to his wife about doing such an operation to save someone’s life, wherein statistically speaking a donor like Zell would only have a one in four thousand chance of dying, Emily Kravinsky told her husband that he shouldn’t do it even if the chances were infinitesimal. Ian Parker of The New Yorker quotes Zell as saying: “Many people felt the way my wife did: She said ‘No matter how infinitesimal the risk to you’re family, we’re your family, and the recipient doesn’t count.”

    According to The New Yorker, Zell said of “his wife’s initial attitude…she was ‘adamantly opposed’ on the grounds of familial responsibility.” She was afraid he could die giving. And what if one of his own kids one day needed a kidney?

    But Kravinsky, who has a keen mathematical mind, calculated the odds of such an event [his own children needing a kidney] to be on the order of one in two hundred fifty thousand.

    That’s why Zell had to do it, regardless of what his wife thought. Some poor person had a 100% chance of dying if he didn’t. To not go through with the plan would be to value his own life at 4,000X his faceless victim—a fact he found “obscene,” or so he reported in his interview with PCN.

    So he told his wife a lie about where he was going for the weekend and he secretly checked himself in to the Albert Einstein Medical Center [an inner-city Philly hospital servicing mostly poor, African Americans] and gave his kidney to an African American woman named Donnell Reid.

    Ian Parker of The New Yorker notes: “he did not have his wife’s approval for the donation” and reports that Kravinsky said: “I snuck out” to do the donation.

    Parker reports he: “had not told his wife about the plan, but he had contacted [the Philadelphia Daily News]”. SimplySharing.com notes Zell went “public with his donation because he hopes it will inspire others to donate organs.”

    Maybe not the smartest move on Zell’s part, to lie to his wife while telling the world the truth, at least in terms of keeping his already stressed marriage together. But the lie was necessary from Kravinsky’s point of view because he was worried his wife would do something to stop the surgery. The Bucks County Courier Times reports that: “he sneaked out of the house…so his wife wouldn’t find out and stop him.”

    Emily found out about Zell’s deceit at a supermarket, on the front page of a newspaper. SimplySharing.com reports: “Kravinsky’s wife, Emily, learned about it…at the supermarket, when a newspaper headline caught her eye. By then, her husband’s right kidney was attached to another woman.” In a taped interview with PCN, Zell said “My wife was in the supermarket and she happened to notice a newspaper article about it and that was a tough way for her to find out.”

    Ian parker of The New Yorker reports that Zell told him: “She was furious. She didn’t want me to die, but, on the other hand, she was beyond human rage.”

    He also pointed out to PCN that “If I told my wife I was taking up the hobby of bicycling [where chances of dying are greater than kidney donation] she wouldn’t scream and shriek and no one would run around accusing me of abandoning my family.” Apparently Emily screamed and shrieked and accused Zell of abandoning his family when she learned the truth.

    That’s when the media seized big time on Zell’s story. And, of course, they wanted to hear from his wife. As Zell told PCN: “The media started calling her and she had very ripe reactions to that.” He went on to tell PCN, ” Things were pretty bad between us.”

    So Emily refused to do interviews with papers all across the country and she urged her husband to not do the interviews either, for the sake of the family’s privacy. A PhillyMag reporter, who profiled Zell after the kidney donation, wrote: “Zell’s wife Emily wouldn’t talk to me for this article, but I do meet her briefly one weekend morning at her home, while I’m waiting for Zell [and] I ask if I can interview her.”

    “It’s against my wishes that the story be published,” she told the PhillyMag author. The author of the PhillyMag story continues: “I tell her there’s nothing I can do. “Oh yeah there is,” she says angrily. “You can get your hands off the keyboard.” Then she walks into her house and slams the front door with the righteous anger of a woman exerting her only bit of control over an absurd situation.”

    Ian Parker of The New Yorker reports that when he spoke with Emily on the phone about what Zell had done: “Emily’s anger at Zell’s actions was made clear.” He writes that she told him her “opposition [to Zell’s kidney donation] was constant.”

    SimplySharing.com reports that Emily’s hostility had “something to do with the way Kravinsky sneaked out of the house and to the hospital on that July morning, so that [she] worried that he was risking his life, fearing that one of their four children might someday need that kidney. [She] could not stop him. It imperiled [their] marriage.”

    And the New Yorker reports that after the donation: “Kravinsky’s conversations with his family left him feeling like an alien.”

    In any case, despite Emily’s opposition to Zell’s donation of his kidney and to the new media frenzy surrounding, Kravinsky liked the limelight, and saw it as an opportunity to spread his message about the reasons people should be charitable. So Kravinsky continued to be interviewed by PhillyMag, despite his wife’s above documented protest.

    Zell went on to do an interview with the New Yorker magazine, went on to do an interview with Robert Siegel of NPR, appeared on the CBS Early Show, PCN, and did other TV appearances in several countries.

    But he got a little carried away in these interviews, taking his philanthropic philosophy to new extremes, reasoning in a public forum that he would sacrifice one of his own children if he could save several others. When Ian Parker of The New Yorker interviewed him, for example, Zell said: “I don’t know that two children should die so that one of my kids lives.”

    He also spoke to several media outlets about committing a philanthropic suicide wherein he’d donate all of his organs to save 12 others. But he said he would never do it because, as The New Yorker reports, Zell mused: “before it happened I’d have to endure screams and yells from my family.”

    The UK Telegraph reports: “After learning about his willingness to donate part of his liver, a lobe of his lung and bone marrow, [Emily] forced him to put a stop to his astonishing beneficence before he gave away every useful organ in his body.”

    Emily’s anger and frustration at Zell’s behavior has been made public by several newspapers. In fact, she was so angry, The New York Times reports: “His wife, Emily, a psychiatrist, has threatened to divorce him…worried that his altruism is coming at the expense of their four children.” The New Yorker also reports she: “threatened to divorce him.” And that Zell “often spoke in fateful terms about his marriage, which held together but was under constant stress.”

    SimplySharing.com reports: “Any glory was outweighed by the criticism he has faced, and by the anger of his wife, who threatened to leave him

    After this great tension with his wife erupted as a result of Zell’s donation+media blitz, Zell garnered the attention of some people in the Pennsylvania government, who wrote a resolution in Zell’s name, honoring his charity, as reported on PCN and which is a matter of public record in PA.

    Of course by this time, his marriage was very stressed and his wife had already threatened divorce. So Zell invited Emily to bring the kids to the resolution in his honor so that they might be proud of their father—he hoped it would be a healing event for the family.

    But Emily never came to this public event. And Zell sat next to empty seats during the public ceremony. And Zell was humiliated by it. “I cried all the way back home,” a source close to Kravinsky was told.

    The Telegraph UK reports that Zell said: “I have come to see that I was wrong with Emily. I argued that a refusal to give a kidney to a person who would otherwise die is the same as murder – you are responsible for their death – and that my wife’s refusal to let me donate was like murder. Now I realize that she is entitled to her own feelings and her own opinions.”

    According to the Telegraph UK, this admission / realization “has brought his marriage back from the brink, and has helped Mr. Kravinsky to realize that his compulsion to give away everything, including his life, has been unfair to Emily,
    and their four children, aged four to 12.”

    In an effort to save his marriage and family, Kravinsky has put a bunch of equity into a private retirement account for Emily and bought his wife a new house. In an article by Peter Singer in The New York Times Magazine, it is written: “to appease his wife, he recently went back into real estate, made some money and bought the family a larger home. But he still remains committed to giving away as much as possible, subject only to keeping his domestic life reasonably tranquil.”

    He also has bought his wife the new minivan she argued for well before his kidney donation.

    Comment by The Giver — 5 January 2007 @ 6:55 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment