By the book

Penniless immigrant makes good in America through education and hard work is a story told over and over, filling many a book in the library. And that library serves as the teacher and enlightener of immigrants and their children, turning foreigners into citizens. It is free to all and open to anyone with a curiosity and desire to learn.

The New York Public Library is that place and we now mourn the passing last week of its savior, Vartan Gregorian. In 87 years of outstanding achievement, Gregorian was once that penniless immigrant who made good in America through education and hard work.

An Armenian born in northern Iran, he grew up speaking Armenian, Persian and Turkish. As his Tabriz hometown was Soviet occupied from the time was 7 years old, he learned Russian before moving alone as a teenager to Beirut, picking up Arabic and French and then his last tongue, English, before heading to America and academic stardom.

This polyglot scholar was a leader at several esteemed private institutions during his very long career — Penn, Brown, the Carnegie Corp. — but where he spent his shortest time, just eight years, was the most public of institutions, the New York Public Library, and that is where his mark was the greatest.

Arriving as president of that magnificent marble heap on Fifth Ave. in 1981, after the city’s near collapse of the 1970s, he found a grand old lady beaten down. He revived her, raising hundreds of millions of private dollars and getting the government to invest millions to support the living and breathing branches where generations of kids and grownups have taken in the world from their own neighborhoods.

He left a renewed and vibrant library. Gregorian was the first immigrant to be president of the New York Public Library, following which he was the first immigrant to be president of Brown. But he wasn’t the first immigrant to be president of the Carnegie Corp. That was Andrew Carnegie himself, the penniless immigrant who built the branch libraries that Gregorian restored.