Fourteenth Street

Avrahmel Mielnick is a precocious fourteen-year-old yeshiva student with an IQ that is off the charts and a strange proclivity for burning down garages, especially those belonging to people who torment him. Caught in the maze of racial transition that encompassed Chicago's Lawndale during the early 1950s, Avrahmel's once-secure and predictable world begins to come apart as he and his teenage friends become pawns in a conflict between Chicago's political machine attempting to stop the growth of black political power and a black leadership increasingly growing impatient with the pace of the city's acquiescence to its demands for recognition. Although a work of fiction, Fourteenth Street is inspired by real people and real events. It is the story of a tempestuous time in our urban history that saw the racial transformation of America's Northern cities. This is a story told in the rage and violence of teenagers, black and white, Jew and gentile, culminating in violence, murder, and fire. Witnessing the murder of a black friend, Avrahmel must overcome the calculated apathy of the political structure not to seek prosecution. To achieve justice that knows no racial boundaries, Avrahmel ultimately calls on his religious sense of duty and puts himself in harm's way to challenge a corrupt political system's attempt to demean a life because it was the wrong color. The events that inspired this work led to a controversial and precedent-setting legal decision.
About the Author: Abraham H. Miller grew up in Chicago's notorious 24th Ward during the period of Lawndale's racial transition from an ethnic-white neighborhood to a black neighborhood. The events and the period he writes about, although fictional, were inspired by real experiences and real people. As a young academic, he taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana and served on an intercampus-board at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he had direct involvement with the workings of the city administration. He subsequently became acquainted with Dr. Milton Rakove, who was the official historian of the Cook County Democratic Party, and a wonderful source of information on the workings of the Chicago machine. As a specialist in ethnic politics and political violence, Professor Miller brings to this fictional account of Chicago's racial transformation the knowledge of an academician, the experience of having lived through this tempestuous period, and a perspective forged in the crucible of time and seasoned by hindsight. Professor Miller has published numerous academic articles on urban violence and was a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Institute of Justice. No matter where he lives, he is and always will be a Chicagoan.