18-year-old Moshe Levy will be sent to the wilds of Western Canada, to work on his pioneering uncle’s ranch. This is not the Old West of John Wayne, Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott. The Canadian West of the turn of the century was peopled by Yiddish-speaking cowboys who learned Blackfoot, and Blackfoot Indians who learned Yiddish. By Chinese coolies and Scots, Poles and Eastern European immigrants of every description. Moshe will have little patience mucking out horse stalls, but he will revel in being taught to shoot by a Yiddish-speaking Blackfoot Indian horse whisperer with the unlikely name of Kipling. He will leave the ranch in Pincher Creek, Alberta and migrate to Edmonton, to become a professional bare-knuckle brawler, pickpocket and thief. It is there that he will befriend a Chinese restaurant owner, who is being beaten and robbed by a group of white rednecks, who Moshe, now calling himself Morris, will beat half to death with all the rage he felt for those who slaughtered his family back in the Old Country.
Based on the real-life character of Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen, he will be offered a new life by the Chinese restaurant owner, who is, in fact, the chief fundraiser for Dr. Sun-Yat Sen, founder of modern China. Dr. Sun is on a tour of North America, raising money from the Chinese diaspora. He will need a white bodyguard, and Morris Levy gets the job. After saving Sun’s life from one of the many assassins the Chinese revolutionary faces, Sun will make him an offer he can’t refuse. This former child of the ghetto, who watched his family slaughtered before him, will become a colonel, and later a general, in the Chinese army. During WWI, he will lead Chinese troops, who are used to build railways for the allies in Europe, in battle, armed only with pickaxes and shovels, against the Kaiser’s best, and see them decorated for bravery. And when the War to End All Wars is over, he will return to China, navigating the dangerous waters of competing warlords and opium smugglers in the violent birth of modern China, through the horrors of WWII and the civil war between the Nationalist and Communist forces – and will be the only figure respected by both. His contemporaries will not only be Dr. Sun-Yat Sen, Chiang Kai-Shek, Chou Enlai and Mao Tse-tung but the extraordinary Soong Sisters, two of whose lives he will save. One of the Soongs will become Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Another will be the Deputy Premier of the People’s Republic of China. And the third will be married to one of the richest men in the world. Finally, Morris will be there, at the end of his life, to help open the doorway between West and East, a behind-the-scenes mover and shaker helping to make the Nixon-Mao Tse-tung era a reality.
