Lansky does a wonderful thing by rescuing books, and it's heartening to read about his efforts. But after a while his story becomes repetitive (find books, save books, catalogue books), and he definitely spends time patting himself and his organization on the back -- a little off-putting, even if he's earned it. ( )

In 1980, Aaron Lansky stumbled somewhat haphazardly upon the plight of Yiddish books, which were being destroyed en masse by the very families of the people who had so painstakingly collected them over the preceding century. With rampant assimilation and secularization, Yiddish was quickly becoming a dead language, and its literature was no longer considered useful to rising generations of Americanized Jews. Lansky, then twenty-three years old, decided that something must be done to save the remaining Yiddish books, and has since dedicated his life to saving these books -- not just the 70,000 scholars believed to be remaining, but more than 1.5 million altogether.

The collection grew so quickly that Lanksy decided to found the National Yiddish Book Center, which has evolved over time to be one of the most valuable resources to the Jewish community worldwide, offering a variety of multimedia resources to educate visitors about Yiddish language and literature, Jewish community and culture, history, and more. What started out as one man's dumpster diving to save a few books has grown into an amazing cultural resource.

This is the remarkably engaging story of Lansky's quest to save the world's Yiddish books -- but more than that, it is a story of nostalgia, neglect, revival, and rebirth. Lanksy's efforts not only saved more than 1.5 million Yiddish books, but they helped to revive the language and people's interest in the culture of Eastern European Jews and their American immigrant counterparts. The story is told with humor and compassion, and is by turns both outright hilarious and deeply moving, bringing the reader to laughter and tears as Lanksy recounts the stories of the Jews who once owned the books now forsaken. Above all, the story is immensely inspiring, and shows what a difference one man's efforts can make, even when all seems lost.

Aaron Lansky starts off as a university student interested in learning about his culture, the Jewish culture. He soon finds that to do that, it would be beneficial to be fluent in Yiddish. He then finds that to learn Yiddish properly, he and his few classmates will need Yiddish books, which are hard to come by. But as he starts trying to scrounge up the books he needs for graduate classes as McGill, he also learns that there are instances where the Yiddish books he is so interested in acquiring are in danger of being lost or destroyed. So starts his journey.

Not long thereafter, he has opted to become a full-time Yiddish book rescuer rather than a student and academic. Things just snowball from there. He explains in his foreword: 'In 1980, at the age of twenty-three, I decided to save the world's Yiddish books. At the time scholars believed 70,000 volumes remained; today, my colleagues and I have collected more than one and a half million -- many of them at the last minute from attics and basements, demolition sites and Dumpsters'.

Towards the end of this grand adventure, as Aaron explains his way of proceeding with direct-mail fund-raising, he sums up some of the highlights of the past 20 years spent collecting the world's Yiddish books: 'I spoke to our members as friends, letting them know what we were doing and why. In addition to an annual renewal letter there were frequent emergencies: to recover those eighty-five thousand folios of forgotten sheet music, to preserve the world's last Yiddish books in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Mexico or Cuba. Our members broke every record in the generosity of their response.'

Some of the things I learned from this book include not only the more expected such as Big Names in Yiddish writing and many aspects of Jewish history and culture but also the unexpected like the fact that rescuing books is action-packed and labour intensive. It involves mostly driving, packing and doing some heavy lifting. In the case of gathering books from aging people who are passing along some of their most valued treasures, it also involves getting sitting down to eat and to listen to their empassioned stories.

Toward the end, I was curious about the author's personal life and, sure enough, a few pages later, he included a few pages about how and when he met his wife, thereby delivering on every front. A well-written, constantly interesting account of a Very Important Mission.

I don't think I throw the word 'hero' around lightly. But by the end of this book, I certainly thought of Aaron Lansky as one. ( )

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Lansky, Aaron, 1955-