Jay Greenfield, a New York attorney whose late-blooming literary career produced Max’s Diamonds, an acclaimed first novel that probed the haunting legacy of the Holocaust and the moral ambiguities of American Jewish life, died on Sunday, June 29, 2025, in Cape Cod, where he was on vacation with family. He was in his early nineties.

Born and raised in Rockaway, Queens, Greenfield grew up in the Arverne neighborhood, a place he once described as “dead eight months of the year” and full of immigrant stories that left an indelible mark on his imagination.

As he recalled in a conversation with his editor, David Groff, in Audere Magazine, “In 1947 or 1948, I was working in a grocery store about two blocks from the boardwalk, and I can remember a short, squat man hauling hundred pound bags of kasha…. The guy had numbers on his arm. I wanted to know about it. But of course, I wasn’t going to talk to him. I was afraid of what he’d say, afraid that his experiences made him different from other people, which in fact they did.”

This lifelong confrontation with memory, trauma and Jewish identity shaped Max’s Diamonds, published when Greenfield was in his 80s. The novel follows Paul, a Jewish lawyer who tries to outrun his heritage even as he is haunted by his cousin Max, a Holocaust survivor whose moral compromises leave an indelible mark.

As Greenfield put it, “Max is a Jew who suffered in the Holocaust, but he found a way to benefit from it, and the knowledge of that destroys him. But first, Max manages to pass along more than a little of that pain and guilt to Paul,” the novel’s troubled and troubling antihero protagonist.

When the novel was published, by Chickadee Prince Books, in 2016, it received wide acclaim for both its commercial readability and the way Greenfield had reinvented and inverted a genre of Jewish fiction pioneered by an earlier generation that included Philip Roth. It quickly became one of the quickest selling and best-selling books for its publisher, which is today owned by CINN Global, the international media company run by renowned entrepreneur Steve Acunto.

Greenfield’s own life was marked by activism and a commitment to justice. Inspired by his older brother, who fought and died with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

“I felt I had to live up to my brother,” he said. “No, I couldn’t live up to my brother, because if you lived up to him you died. But I had to try, and it just seemed to be common sense to me that Jews should join with Black people to picket the Woolworth’s in Harvard Square, and I put an enormous amount of effort into that, and I guess it was successful.… I went south to be a lawyer, because that’s what I am, and that’s what I do best, and that’s what they needed.”

During Freedom Summer, he worked in the Deep South, an experience that he later explored in his post-Max fiction. He won one of the first court orders enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act by requiring a segregated Louisiana restaurant to serve Black patrons, a landmark legal victory that brought both accolades and threats.

After returning to New York, Greenfield continued his legal career at the Paul, Weiss law firm, and also found time to raise a family with Judy, his wife of many decades. (She, along with his children, Ben, Mark and Susan, survive him.) Still, he never abandoned the questions that had driven his civil rights work, and which would one day drive his fiction: guilt, identity, assimilation and moral responsibility.

“The one thing you learn in Hebrew School is Jews have been persecuted,” Greenfield said. “You learn it six days a week. I can only quote Max: ‘You beat the goyim at their own game.’ ”

At his death, Greenfield had recently completed a new novel.

Despite beginning his career as a novelist late in life, Greenfield embraced the freedom it gave him.

“The biggest advantage for me in starting a writing career at this age is that I don’t care what anybody thinks,” he said. “Whatever I was supposed to do in life, I’ve done it, I’ve enjoyed it, I’m pleased with it.”

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This article was written by the staff of Oblivioni Magazine.