Harry Azoff, 95, found humor in dying and wrote a play about it
Mr. Azoff was an Army veteran, jeweler, and fixture in his Queen village neighborhood. But he drew public attention with a comedy he cowrote in 2017 about dying.
In 2017, Harry Azoff, then a hospice patient, collaborated with his hospice volunteer, Morgan Thompson, to turn their deep, often hilarious, talks about his life and impending death into a play called Hospice-tality.
It was a comedy, mostly. “Have you ever seen cartoon drawings of the Grim Reaper?” Mr. Azoff’s character asks at one point in the play. “How can anyone take that guy seriously?”
Mr. Azoff, who was fighting end-stage kidney disease at his Queen Village home with the help of hospice services, lived to see the play performed by Philly Improv Theatre Group at Penn Hospice Rittenhouse.
“I’m making another stage" of life, he told Inquirer reporter Stacey Burling on that day in September 2017. “I think everybody in their lives, at one time or other, feels like they want to do something expressive.”
On Wednesday, July 17, the curtain fell on Mr. Azoff’s final stage. The 95-year-old former Sansom Street jeweler died of kidney disease at his home.
Mr. Azoff, who found humor in dying, also found it in living. He was a positive, entertaining force in his Queen Village neighborhood. “He was known for his sharp wit, and his jokes had an ironic kick to them,” said son Richard.
Born in West Philadelphia, he graduated from Overbrook High School before enlisting in the Army in 1943.
He saw combat as a rifleman during World War II. He landed with the Eighth Infantry Division, 28th Regiment at Normandy’s Utah Beach 19 days after D-Day and was wounded during fighting in France on Aug. 25, 1944. He was awarded the Purple Heart for the injury and also received the European African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with four bronze stars.
While serving in France, he suffered a severe case of frostbite in both feet, his family said. Military doctors prescribed penicillin, which was just starting to be used in such cases. The treatment spared him the amputation of both feet.
He was honorably discharged in 1945 as a private. Afterward, he returned home to West Philadelphia. In 1949, he married Hilda Finkler, the sister of a fellow soldier. The couple raised two sons in Broomall.
Mr. Azoff succeeded his father in a jewelry business on Jewelers Row. He learned the craft from his father as a teenager. Under Mr. Azoff’s leadership, the business, which he called Azoff & Cohan when he took on a partner, flourished. At its height in the 1960s, the shop employed eight people. Mr. Azoff retired in 1975. The shop is no longer in business.
In 1975, the Azoffs moved to Society Hill, and then to a home on Front Street in Queen Village in the late 1970s. His wife died in 2000. After her death, he stayed in his home alone, drove his Camry, and remained positive and realistic even as his health declined.
“Death. I expect it. When the ugly guy comes to get me, OK. So be it,” Mr. Azoff told WHYY.org in September 2017. “I had a nice time. I had a good life — a beautiful wife, nice kids. What else is there?”
Mr. Azoff was an artist, musician, and poet. He enjoyed making stained-glass creations and oil paintings. He often recited poems in public, and sang or played the harmonica and piano at informal gatherings of neighbors and friends.
“His soirées, as he called them, included an array of delicacies that he had specially selected for his guests,” his son said.
Besides his son, he is survived by five grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and nieces. Another son, Mitchell, died in 2017.
Services are private.
Donations may be made to the Penn Medicine Hospice Friends Fund via https://giving.apps.upenn.edu/fund?program=MC&fund=843419&appeal=PMWEB.