Generous to a Fault or Faulty Generosity?

JENKINTOWN, Pa. — Zell Kravinsky doesn't get it. He has tried, he says, to live a moral life. How could he be the bad guy?

Starting from nothing, he made millions -- and then gave millions away to save human lives.

Then, this summer, he relinquished something more precious. He donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger, a poor woman who had struggled through life.

And yet, he has suffered insults and attacks -- by Internet posters, like the man who called him "a nut job." By newspaper columnists, like the one who questioned his motives.

"Generous man or heartless lunatic?" read the headline.

Kravinsky is befuddled. "I'm not generous and I'm not insane," he says. "Maybe the sanest thing I do is to give things away."

Perhaps the hostility has something to do with the way Kravinsky sneaked out of the house and to the hospital on that July morning so that his wife, Emily, could not stop him. She feared that he was risking his life and that one of their four children might need that kidney someday. His actions imperiled his marriage.

Perhaps it has something to do with some of the inflammatory things Kravinsky said in the spotlight's glare. No one should have two houses when people were homeless, he said, and no one should have two kidneys while others struggled to live without one. And he suggested that he might consider giving his other kidney to someone who would better serve humanity.

Which would, of course, be the end of Zell Kravinsky.

"I should just give all of me to those who need me, whether it is my body, my money or myself," he says.

The things Kravinsky does, the things he says, make some people uncomfortable. He is somewhere out there alone on the far outreaches of altruism, and logic leads to one of two conclusions: Either he's crazy, or everyone else is selfish.

"Maybe it's a kind of rationalization, but at some point, we get comfortable with what we're doing for other people and we say, 'That's enough,' " says Barry Katz, a friend of Kravinsky's.

Kravinsky has never reached that point. Katz says his friend's very existence forces the question:

"If you could do more, and you're not doing it, why not?"

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Donnell Reid cannot understand the criticism -- but then, Zell Kravinsky's kidney is at work inside her, allowing her a normal life after eight years of dialysis. To her mind, her benefactor is a hero, while his detractors "aren't willing to put their neck out for someone they don't know."