This true story of a quest to save Jewish literature is "a detective story, a profound history lesson, and a poignant evocation of a bygone world" (The Boston Globe).

In 1980 an entire body of Jewish literature—the physical remnant of Yiddish culture—was on the verge of extinction. Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children, only to be discarded or destroyed. So Aaron Lansky, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish works.

Lansky's passion led him to travel from house to house collecting the books—and the stories of these Jewish refugees and the vibrant intellectual world they inhabited. He and a team of volunteers salvaged books from dusty attics, crumbling basements, demolition sites, and dumpsters. When they began, scholars thought that fewer than seventy thousand...