The Book Rescuer
How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Recipient of a Sydney Taylor Book Award for Younger Readers
An ALA Notable Book
A Bank Street Best Book of the Year
“Text and illustration meld beautifully.” —The New York Times
“Stunning.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Inspired...[a] journalistic, propulsive narrative.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The story comes alive through the bold acrylic and gouache art.” —Booklist (starred review)
From New York Times Best Illustrated Book artist Stacy Innerst and author Sue Macy comes a story of one man’s heroic effort to save the world’s Yiddish books in their Sydney Taylor Book Award–winning masterpiece.
Over the last forty years, Aaron Lansky has jumped into dumpsters, rummaged around musty basements, and crawled through cramped attics. He did all of this in pursuit of a particular kind of treasure, and he’s found plenty. Lansky’s treasure was any book written Yiddish, the language of generations of European Jews. When he started looking for Yiddish books, experts estimated there might be about 70,000 still in existence. Since then, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has collected close to 1.5 million books, and he’s finding more every day.
Told in a folkloric voice reminiscent of Patricia Polacco, this story celebrates the power of an individual to preserve history and culture, while exploring timely themes of identity and immigration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This inspired pairing of two top picture book biographers tells the story of Aaron Lansky, an "all-American boy" (a Star Trek poster decorates his bedroom) who in college became convinced that Yiddish books represented the "portable homeland" of the Jewish people. With Yiddish dying out after the Holocaust and little mainstream support ("Yiddish was a language whose time had passed"), Lansky learned the language, then began saving Yiddish books any way he could. He pulled nearly 5,000 out of a dumpster and accepted "one book at a time" from elderly owners ("We didn't eat much," one book donor tearfully tells him, "but we always bought a book. It was a necessity of life"). Founded in 1980, Lansky's Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., is today home to 1.5 million rescued books and is a hub of Yiddish studies. Innerst (Ruth Bader Ginsburg), who notes in an afterword that his illustrations were inspired by Chagall, contributes dramatic, textural acrylic and gouache images, with sculptural figures, expressionistic settings, and the deep, rich tones of vintage book bindings. Evoking both a lost past and an urgent present, they're a marvelous complement to the journalistic, propulsive narrative by Macy (Motor Girls). Ages 5 8.
