Text and illustration meld beautifully in Sue Macy and Stacy Innerst’s THE BOOK RESCUER: How a Mensch from Massachusetts Saved Yiddish Literature for Generations to Come, the story of a lesser-known hero, Aaron Lansky. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and the founder of the Yiddish Book Center, he almost singlehandedly saved Yiddish books in America at a time when Yiddish was considered a langguage “whose time had passed.” When he started rescuing books from Dumpsters, it was thought there were maybe 70,000 Yiddish books left; his team has now saved 1.5 million.

Macy, who has written books about women’s history and sports, knows how to start a tale: “Kum aher. Sit down. I want to tell you a story.” In these luminescent pages, an “All-American boy” grows into a man in love with a language considered dead. The text is sprinkled with Yiddish (“Aaron could have plotzed! Destroying Yiddish books was like erasing Jewish history!”) without getting Catskills-y.

Innerst’s acrylic, gouache and digital art shares the book’s gentle humor: Little Aaron was a Star Trek fan, and images of Leonard Nimoy (a Yiddish-speaker himself) as Spock sneakily appear, like a pointy-eared Waldo, throughout the book. A cheerful spread strews around Yiddish words that have entered the vernacular (“klutz,” “bagel,” “glitch”). In another, little Aaron and hippie collegiate Aaron are each surrounded by washes of warm reds and pinks and flying rings of books forming a subtle infinity sign.