Excerpt from The New Earth by Jess Row, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Deep breath.

"What we should be talking about, if you want my opinion, is estate planning. If you're like me, your files are a mess and your kids are always after you about it. Not this minute. But not not this minute, okay? Let's make an appointment for three months."

He's had people in tears at the end of the speech. He's been embraced by women wearing supportive garments not visible through their loose drapey dresses. Lots of nodding and reaching for the Kleenex. One poor guy even applauded. But Ruth Liebler sits alone and stoic. Unmoved. She writes him a check on the spot, shakes his hand.

Thank you for your time. Maybe she's Congregationalist on her father's side. Her eyes saying, You are a hypocrite, a calumnist, a failure, and a sellout. And his eyes saying, back to her, he hopes, why stop there?

My last client, he's thinking. She senses something. Later she'll say, there was something off about him, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

"It's funny," she says on her way out the door. "Stan always said, 'the thing about him is he's actually not Jewish.'"

"I'm not," he says. "Like I was saying. Davenport, Iowa. United Church of Christ. My dad, rumor has it, once went to divinity school. Naomi's Jewish. My kids are Jewish. We were members of Beth Shalom for thirty years. I read Hebrew. I fast on Yom Kippur. My firm is Jewish. Ninety-five percent of my friends are Jewish. My shrink was Jewish. Should I go on?"

"You never converted."

"No, the technical term for me is stranger in the camp. In the old days my rabbi used to call me a righteous gentile. You'd have to ask him if it still applies. At shul, once, a guy came up and said to me, 'people like you don't really exist.'"

"Of course you do. Here you are."

"That," he says, "is no evidence of anything."

* * *

As he exits the elevator Jean-Louis, the security guard, catches his eye over a corner of the Daily News and waves. He waves back.

One twelve in the post-meridian, Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Fifteen years and twenty-nine days of the New Life.

Imagine him as he is, the novel asks us. Imagine me, he says to no one in particular, go ahead. Imagine me, on this, my last day on earth.

He's out on the ground, on the street, Fifty-Sixth between Fifth and Park, jingling the keys in his vest pocket, the sun dry and blinding, an unfeeling forty-eight degrees in the shade. This in the middle of April, some spring we're having. He's left work early. The prerogative of the senior partner. Joni, he said, a first and last lie slipping from his lips, my urologist had to reschedule. If you need anything, I'll be on my phone.

April 11: Primo Levi Day. His private holiday.

Circa 2010, he sat for a week on the porch in Blue Hill and read all of Levi's later books—The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved—and then two of the biographies, one by Thomson and one by Angier. To make sure he had the facts straight. On April 11, 1987, at 10:20 A.M., Levi jumped from his third-floor apartment into the interior courtyard of his building in Torino. He was sixty-seven. No immediate cause for the suicide was identified, one article said, as if suicide, presumptively, has an immediate cause? Some investigators believed he might have fallen by accident, due to dizziness from a prostate medication; this theory was considered and rejected. Levi had collected his mail from the building's concierge only a few minutes earlier: he appeared perfectly healthy. It was an ordinary spring morning. Nothing had changed. His mother and mother-in-law, in their nineties, suffering from dementia, were in another wing of the apartment with their live-in nurse; no one else was home. Life was going on. He stepped out of it.

Cynthia Ozick described Levi's suicide as the final proof that his rage over the Holocaust had no end: "The rage of resentment," she wrote, "is somehow linked to self-destruction."

Excerpted from The New Earth by Jess Row. Copyright © 2023 by Jess Row. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.