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In Cherry, more than half the men who went to work at the mine the morning of Nov. 13, 1909, kissed their wives good-bye and never returned. As for Tintori Katz's grandfather, a twist of fate saved him that cold November day. As her mother tells it, he had woken up with a hangover, something fairly for- eign for a man who rarely drank. Instead of going to work at the mine, he'd decided to slip back under the covers — a decision that can only Of Life And Death Social Dance Club Entertainment Friday & Saturday Nights CROSSING OVER from page 90 33210 W. 14 Mile Road In Simsbury Plaza Just East of Farmington Road West Bloomfield SPOSITA'S RISTORANTE (248) 538-8954 The Simon eVi t tale Band f d48) 544-7373 Gerber knows only too well the degradation and suffering of the eld- erly, kept alive beyond their time in "a holding pen for dying animals." She had watched helplessly as her own mother begged for death. "But Anna is not my mother at all," says the piize-winning author. "She didn't have that irony, that speed of retort. [Anna] is a combina- tion of what I knew about her life, what I imagined a certain voice in her head would sound like — which is a combination of me and her — and my invention." A fiction-writing instructor at California Institute of Technology, Gerber is a careful observer of those thousands of details that forge fami- ly dynamics, and she skillfully trans- forms life's ordinary and gut-wrench- ing moments into compelling prose. We see Anna as a young mother in The Kingdom of Brooklyn, even more strident from a child's point of view. Nearly 80 at the start of Anna in Chains, she shuffles, still independ- ent, through her neighborhood, then sinks into ever descending circles of hell: retirement home, nursing home, utter dependence. Even Gerber's nonfiction journal, Old Mother, Little Cat, brilliantly balances her nursing home visits to her real-life mother with her nurtur- ing of a lost kitten. In the end Gerber tells us: "Anna accepted her fate." But has Gerber accepted it? "I haven't made peace with the way we are forced to suffer at the end of our lives," she says. "I'm hop- ing the world will rearrange itself from those fanatics who say that life at any cost is worth preserving." Is the Anna cycle really ended? "Do any Jews even believe in an afterlife?" muses Gerber. "I didn't hear it from my relatives. They had no confidence that there was any kind of heavenly reward ahead." With Anna gone, Gerber wastes no time with idle retrospection. Look in November for Botticelli Blue Skies, the saga of her sojourn in Italy, and a book of essays, Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions, due in spring 2003. ❑ The town of Somerset, Pa., celebrated the 2002 rescue of all nine miners trapped in the Quecreek mine. remind us of how fragile and how unpredictable life can be. The release date of Tintori Katz's book, Trapped: the 1909 Cherry Mine Disaster, originally set for September, has been rescheduled for this month. The publisher, Atria Books, hopes to capitalize on the interest of an already involved audience, she said. And if Hollywood is any measure of how successful a book will be, there's no question Tintori Katz's grandfather would be very proud. The manuscript of Trapped is cur- rently sitting on the desks of directors Robert Redford, Tom Hanks, Kathryn Bigelow and Oliver Stone. Not a bad accomplishment for the granddaughter of a man who worked in the mines. Karen Tintori Katz's Trapped: the 1909 Cheri), Mine Disaster will be a featured selection at this- year's Jewish Book Fair, which runs Nov. 6-17 at the West Bloomfield and Oak Park JCCs.