Not Silenced, 33 Years After Her Own Subway Nightmare

On the second night of Hanukkah, Renee Katz lit the menorah candles Sunday evening at her home in Queens, using her right hand a bit tentatively. Hanukkah candles are slender. They are not easy for Ms. Katz to grasp with the right hand. “I don't have great dexterity,” she said. “Anything that requires fine motor skills is hard.”

The menorah sat atop a piano in the living room. Time was when she played a splendid piano as well as an inspiring flute. She still gives the piano a try at times, playing music that her mother, Rose, wrote - “wild gypsy songs,” the daughter said. But she cannot play for long stretches. As for the flute, it is far back in her past. She can't properly hold the instrument, not with that hand.

Renee Katz. If you've lived in New York for quite a while, the name may now be coming back to you. You remember.

You remember a June morning in 1979. Ms Katz was a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday, bl essed with talent and about to graduate from the High School of Music and Art. That morning, some miserable lowlife pushed her from the platform to the tracks in the subway station at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue.

Ms. Katz instinctively rolled to her left to avoid an oncoming train. She saved her life. But she could not save her right hand. The train sliced it off. The police found it, though, packed it in ice from a nearby bar and rushed it to Bellevue Hospital. There, the hand was reattached after 16 hours of microsurgery, a procedure not routine in those days. But her future as a flutist or a pianist? That was gone.

No one ever paid for that crime. A suspect was put on trial, but a jury acquitted him. The attacker, whoever he was, is “still out there,† Ms. Katz said, and that presumption makes her wary of sharing too many specifics about her life.

Through the years, she has remained an enduring symbol of how even though the city is now much safer than it was in 1979, the normal order can come unglued without warning. It did so once more a few days ago when another person from Queens, Ki-Suck Han, was shoved to the tracks in Midtown, into the path of a Q train pulling into the 49th Street station. Mr. Han did not have Ms. Katz's luck. A man named Naeem Davis is now charged with murdering him.

“It's always so shocking when it happens,” Ms. Katz said of this latest subway nightmare. “It triggered the memories again.” Watching television reports of the horror, “I felt like I was under the train,” she said. “It wasn't easy for me to watch.”

How could it have been? But she has not spent the past 33 years being a victim. Far from it. Right at the start, a nurse at Bellevue told her, “You have five minutes out of every day to feel sorry for yourself. The rest of the time you've got to get up and do something.”

Ms. Katz also absorbed lessons from her Hungarian-born father, Isidore, a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi camps. “You have to understand,” she said, “if he could get through what he went through, I certainly can try to get through what I've been through.”

That she has. At 51, she has been through life's familiar cycles: marriage, the birth of a son, divorce, new love. She went to work as an occupational therapist, mostly treating young people whose lives had been shattered, as hers was in her teens. Her own experience can be useful for them to hear, but she tells it only when the time is ripe.

“I have to b e careful,” Ms. Katz said. “They're wrapped up in their own misery. Listening is the most important thing for me at that point.”

And then there's the music. It never stopped. Maybe it no longer flows on the piano or the flute, but she has a voice, put to sweet use in choral groups, in occasional appearances at Manhattan clubs and in a CD that leans on a Carly Simon song for its title, “Never Been Gone.” She has also written poetry reflecting a spectrum of her emotions across the years: anger, grief, regret, vulnerability, hope and, for sure, love.

“I vowed that nobody would silence me,” Ms. Katz said.

Sure, she had a bad break, and sometimes it's tough out there. “Riding the subway is still hard,” she said. “Being in crowds is hard. My body overreacts to stress. I startle quickly.” But there is so much else, and she ticked off a list that included “a strong desire to give back, ” “a sense of gratitude,” “a perspective on what's important in life.”

All that and the ability use her right hand to light a candle on Hanukkah, a festival that, like her, is about resilience, renewal and, yes, miracles.

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com