A death in Los Angeles symbolizes the COVID-19 tragedy
Renée Algazy née White (Weiss). Photo courtesy of the family.
(OPINION) The scale of the COVID-19 tragedy, now some 650,000 deaths globally, defies comprehension. In one awful month — from Good Friday, April 10, to May 10 — 12 Felician Sisters died from the virus at their convent in Livonia, Michigan. Eighteen other nuns fell sick there. Here in Jerusalem, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron passed away April 12 due to complications of the novel coronavirus. And in Tehran, Iran, Ayatollah Hashem Bathayi Golpayegani died of the pandemic on March 16.
In the context of boundless pain and suffering, the death of so many righteous people of all faiths, I am writing an obituary of my beloved Aunt Renée Algazy née White (Weiss), who died in Los Angeles July 21 after contracting the disease in a nursing home in southern California earlier this year. She was 84. It is my hope that one person’s life can offer meaning and hope in the face of this crisis.
In a disjointed and surreal funeral broadcast on Zoom, her children Mark Algazy and Dina Stuhl eulogized their mother from the graveside, while their sister Laura Lewis, unable to attend the burial spoke from New Rochelle, New York.
“She was a miracle,” Dina said of her mother, one of the 1.5 million children evacuated from London in the face of the Luftwaffe’s Blitz during World War II. Those children spent six years shuttling from hiding place to hiding place in the relative safety of farms in the countryside, sleeping in triple-tier bunk beds lined up in subway stations and tunnels, and watching their world crumble under the rain of Nazi bombs, and V-1 and
V-2 rockets. Her late sister Anita Adlington was hospitalized for malnutrition after her foster family stole her ration coupons.
“A bomb fell on their home’s chimney [in Bermondsey] but failed to explode. It was not her day to die,” Dina said of one wartime incident.
Turning to God, Dina said she was reassured: “I’ve got her now.” To which she replied, “But now I don’t.”
Orphaned when she was 17, Renée sailed to Canada on HMS Queen Mary when cross-Atlantic travel was something one only did once or twice in a lifetime. She left behind a daughter born out of wedlock whom she had given up for adoption in London. Mark recalled in an email:
“My parents told us on many occasions that they had met at a YMCA in Toronto, where they both enjoyed dancing. My mother was 5’9”, and often times had a hard time finding tall men to dance with. Among his other attributes, my father was 5’11.”
“Today I was completely overcome with the beautiful image of the two of them finally being able to dance together again, in the vigorous bodies of their youth. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Before the struggles of marriage, parenthood, home ownership, yada, yada. Just two young people in the dance of life.
“Through the miracle of modern technology, I am able to simply wipe away the tears from the screen of my iPad that would have ruined any piece of paper I tried to put this on.”
Renée’s late husband, Israel Algazy, knew first-hand the travails of the Jewish people in the 20th century. After a childhood in Alexandria in King Farouk’s Egypt, his family fled to the nascent State of Israel in 1948, where he fought in the War of Independence, only to move on to Canada and then the United States because of the new country’s chronic shortage of food and opportunity. Traumatized, he always slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow.
Renée’s “sweet smile and disposition masked a lifetime of turmoil,” said her daughter Laura, who succeeded in connecting with her birth mother in 1994, after her adopted parents had both passed away:
“She fought valiantly to preserve her life for more than 20 years after her second major open-heart surgery but, thankfully, she who loved to plan everything, passed away very peacefully and without a struggle.
“She was a HUGE blessing to me and my daughter Michelle. After 26 years together, I really can’t imagine our lives without having found her. She gave me many things from the mundane love of drinking tea in a bone china cup to the blessings of unconditional love and above all, a belief in miracles. More than anything, I will miss our daily conversations which always ended with ‘I love you.’”
Searching my computer hard drive, I uncovered an email Renée had sent me in 2016:
“Years ago, in calligraphy class, one of the sayings I repeated was ‘experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.’
“I'm very proud of you Gil, how you've overcome the difficulties of your childhood and become the fine, upstanding person you are. Keep on marching to your own drummer.
“Much love always.”
How can we create an appropriate memorial to so many hundreds of thousands of dead? Italian architect Angelo Renna has suggested that, rather than demolishing Milan’s iconic but now empty San Siro stadium, which has been home to the football clubs AC Milan and Inter Milan since 1926, 35,000 cypress trees be planted there in tribute to those who lost their lives to COVID-19.
Similar tributes could be created in abandoned stadiums across the United States, and the world, whether Detroit’s Tiger Stadium or Miami’s Orange Bowl. Those towering trees would eloquently represent what the coronavirus plague has robbed from us.
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He writes for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.