As all of his works, these stories are a nightmare to translate. You are lucky if you can read the original. Set 100 years ago, these tales tell of the lives of the people of Odessa, a big Ukrainian city and a port, run by gangsters, which are, interestingly, Jewish gangsters. So we get characters such as Lyubka the Cossack, who ignores her newborn baby in order to run her business empire; and, the greatest of all, Benya Krik, the King.