“He had a protracted and troublesome course,” Dr. Abraham Sanders, one in every of his physicians at Weill Cornell, wrote in an e-mail. “He was a robust man and was the beneficiary of refined medical care.”
Marco Albert Lewitinn was born on March 12, 1946, to a Jewish household in Cairo. His father, Albert Lewitinn, was a medical engineer, and his mom, Sarah (Amiga) Lewitinn, a homemaker. He grew up talking Arabic and later realized English, French and Spanish.
Egypt had a thriving Jewish neighborhood of 75,000 folks, however they confronted worsening circumstances after the Arab nationalist revolution in 1952 and the Suez Disaster in 1956, which pitted the nation towards Israel, France and Britain. The federal government took over the elder Mr. Lewitinn’s enterprise and, after being briefly detained, he and his household had been expelled in 1958.
They settled in Baltimore, the place Albert Lewitinn was employed by Johns Hopkins College to work on organ transplant know-how.
As a younger man Marc lived in New York Metropolis and Los Angeles, the place he briefly attended faculty, then Paris, the place he met Ondine Inexperienced, the sister of a childhood pal from Cairo. They married in 1968.
The Lewitinns settled within the New York Metropolis space, first in Brooklyn and later in Tenafly, N.J. He opened a enterprise on the Higher West Aspect that operated as a form of every thing retailer for the neighborhood: pawn store, movie processing, electronics restore, jeweler. It turned a neighborhood fixture; John Lennon, who lived close by, got here in often, and Mr. Lewitinn hung an image of himself with Lennon on a wall on the retailer.