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

You have to discover the secret of what is inside repetition, Sensei said, and now he has. The secret to repetition is choosing when and how it ends.

A shot of pure joy; as if his heart jumped, or something did, his gullet, Adam's apple, esophagus. Something jammed in his throat. To have gotten it right for once. The day is a window I can close. See everything now, one last time, without trying to grasp it. See it and let it go.

A pigeon flutters in a shaft of light in the stairwell. Fifty-Seventh Street. The screech of a train rises up, and a gust of subway-station air, which always smells and tastes the same. Machine oil. Straining brakes. Rainwater pooling on the tracks. He drinks it in.

Alexander Wilcox, Lawyer in Holocaust Art Fraud

When did he write that? Two or three months into the grief group; that would put it in 2005 or 2006, the middle Bush years, when he billed nearly nothing but pro bono hours reviewing pointless appeals from Clare Hynes at the NYCLU. Six or eight hours a day looking at photographs of torture victims, and then two hours of grief group, three nights a week, Monday Wednesday Thursday. He wasn't drinking then. He was done with drinking. Naomi was drinking. He was going to grief group, and when Dr. Simmons-Cheng said, bear with me on this, it sounds insane, writing your own obituary, but we all do it on the inside anyway, and that's what group is about, it's about bringing out everything, no filters, no boundaries, he went home and filed five hundred words in crisp Times copy. It took fifteen minutes.

Alexander Wilcox, Lawyer in Holocaust Art Fraud

Alexander Wilcox, a lawyer who exposed his own client as the perpetrator of the largest known fraudulent claim on art seized during the Holocaust, died on _______ of ________. He was _____ years old and lived in Manhattan.

Wilcox, who was known as Sandy, was a young partner at Fein Lewin in 1992 when he was contacted by Irwin Klaufelt, a wealthy Cleveland industrialist. Klaufelt claimed he was grandson and heir to Jonas Klaufelt, a garment manufacturer and then art dealer in Bavaria who before World War II owned one of the world's largest private collections of Netherlandish art, including a Rembrandt etching of one of his own ancestors, the rabbi Manasseh ben Israel. Wilcox aided Klaufelt in recovering a related set of Rembrandt etchings, with an estimated worth of at least $1 million, from a Swiss art dealer in 1996.

In 2000, Wilcox was contacted by distant relatives of Jonas Klaufelt, living in Israel, who suggested that Irwin Klaufelt was an impostor. After conducting his own investigation, Wilcox negotiated with the Manhattan district attorney's office and was able to protect Fein Lewin from a criminal indictment for malpractice. Irwin Klaufelt was later convicted of two counts of wire fraud. He suffered a stroke and died before his sentencing hearing in March 2001.

Wilcox returned to the public eye briefly in 2003 when his daughter Bering, 21, a peace activist, was killed by an Israel Defense Forces sniper during a protest in the West Bank village of Wadi Aboud. Following an international outcry, the Wilcoxes were asked to file charges in Israeli criminal court but declined.

Wilcox was married for ______ years to Naomi Schifrin Wilcox, the climate scientist and author of the bestseller The Shiva Hypothesis, who survives him, as do his daughter Winter and son, Patrick.

And now the beautiful revision:

Alexander Wilcox, a lawyer who exposed his own client as the perpetrator of the largest known fraudulent claim on art seized during the Holocaust, died Wednesday after falling from a window into the interior courtyard of his Upper West Side apartment building. Police said no foul play was suspected. He was 66.

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.