Jerry Kirshenbaum (BSJ60)

When Jerry Kirshenbaum’s family moved into a grand house on fashionable Miami Road in Benton Harbor, Michigan, life was comfortable but not always peaceful. Beneath a serene surface lay the screaming fits of an unhappy mother, the sufferings of a beloved handicapped sister and a long-buried crime committed by the author’s immigrant father, a truck-driving, cigar-chomping burlap bag merchant and poker player known as Mook.

Mook was a man of charisma and contradiction — equal parts hard-bitten and folksy, profane and profound. The story of his ascent from poverty to the splendor of Miami Road is shadowed on every page by a question: Where did he find the strength to get through love, loss and his own failings?

Miami Road is a vivid, often funny portrait of resilience set against the backdrop of Chicago’s once heavily Jewish West Side and Benton Harbor, a raucous Midwestern town whose rise and fall parallels Mook’s ups and downs. Filled with rogues, sad sacks, live wires and deadbeats plus outsized figures like Muhammad Ali and Al Capone, this is an unforgettable story shaped by hardship, humor and heart.