Anna in the Afterlife

author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family from the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles June 28, 2002 It's the ultimate fantasy: You have a seat at your own funeral. Now imagine that while hovering in limbo between your death and burial, you have the power not only to witness the preparations and critique the eulogies, but also to eavesdrop on critical moments in your past for a reality check. Such is the premise of Merrill Joan Gerber's latest, "Anna in the Afterlife," which chronicles Anna's four-day journey between her grueling death at 90 and her burial. When last we left Anna in "Anna in Chains," she was lying helpless in a nursing home, paralyzed in one arm, feeding tube gurgling, begging for death. Not exactly the stuff of comedy. Yet in "Anna in the Afterlife," after seven agonizing years chained to her bed, Anna finally nears that "famous tunnel she'd heard about on Oprah," and what would have turned maudlin from a lesser writer is at once poignant, riveting, even amusing in Gerber's capable hands. "Anna warned [her daughters] constantly: they mustn't do anything illegal and end up in jail. Neither one was familiar with firearms, neither one had access to heavy barbiturates and no one could figure out how to get her to a bridge railing. Ropes, razors and drinking drain cleaner did not appeal to Anna, nor did a plastic bag over her head." At last "the great and famous moment" arrives, and Anna relinquishes "the spark every tiny ant and worm wants to keep hold of, the force that makes flies evade the swatter and convulses fish off their baited hooks." In death, she is free to revisit her past, and memorable characters materialize: her mother's bigamist first husband; her jealous 86-year-old sister, Gert, attempting suicide in a red peignoir; and her half-brother, Sam, who she learns had molested her and her sister. ("I thought it was his thumb," claims an unperturbed Gert.) Loosed in death from the shackles of physical suffering, she is free to unlock her family's many secrets and long forgotten mysteries: Did her brother really drown while fishing on erev Yom Kippur? ("Who needed fish that fresh"?) Did Anna really win her husband by parading in front of her sister's date in a negligee? For the first time Anna confronts her own racial prejudice, her sexual reluctance, her stinginess. "`Nothing but the best" was not a phrase Anna had thought her children should live by. Now she was feeling the consequences of her philosophy -- she'd have third-rate corned beef at her funeral reception, seedless Christian rye bread and prune Danish made with lard, with not a single salty black olive or a plate of pickled herring in sour cream on the table." Now this feisty woman, whose raison d'être had been indignation, experiences doubt. "Should she have been kinder? And to whom?" Gerber knows only too well the degradation and suffering of the elderly, kept alive beyond their time in "a holding pen for dying animals.

The LA Times chose this novel as one of the best of 2002.December 8, 2002 LOS ANGELES TIMESBEST BOOKS OF 2002Fiction Anna in the AfterlifeMerrill Joan GerberSyracuse University Press / Library of Modern JewishLiterature: 124 pp., ...paperMerrill Joan Gerber is not only one of our most underrated contemporary writers, she also may well be our least pretentious. Her utter lack of pretense is a major source of her raw power as a writer. In her latest novel, a tough little gem called "Anna in the Afterlife," Gerber returns to one of her most memorable characters, Anna Goldman, the forceful, discontented mother of the young heroine in "An Antique Man," more recently glimpsed in her 80s lying immobile, resentful and furious in a nursing home in the story collection "Anna in Chains." Now, after seven years in the chains of her illness, Anna finally dies. The opening whisks us into the world-weary mind-set of its heroine: "Once her dying got underway, Anna could not really complain about how the process moved along." Like Saul Bellow, Gerber has a genius for the irritable, the acrid and the embittered: The visitor from another planet who doesn't know what it means to kvetch would need to look no further than Gerber's fiction for superb illustrations of the phenomenon. Unlike Bellow, she does not venture far beyond the personal. Her eyes are trained on the quotidian, but the acuity and intensity of her vision are no less extraordinary...