From the “ Dusty Talmuds” of his childhood, seduced by Flaubert and Maupassaunt , fatally attracted by the barbaric nobility and at the same moment repulsed by the cruelty of the Soviet Cossack mercenary- through the upheavals of the Bolshevik revolution,he becomes a great writer and a threat to Stalin’s utopian nightmare.

Unsettled by current events, he returns by train ,under cover of music and moonlight, along with one of his famous creations- Benya Krik, the pre-eminent jewish gangster of Odesa’s Moldavanka, known simply as The King , who sufferred a fate not unlike his creator. They want to do what they can to help…