When I was a boy about 11, I committed a crime that changed my life.

I stole a book. I was a book thief.

I found it in another kid’s desk and began reading, hiding it behind some boring textbook, and couldn’t give it up.

It’s still with me. I’ll never give it up.

That book that opened up the world to me.

What was it?

“Odysseus the Wanderer,” written for children by the classicist Aubrey de Selincourt.

It is a version of the “Odyssey” of Homer, the greatest adventure story ever told. I’ve since read several translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

The crafty Odysseus, the man of wrath, was an expert trickster. He duped the Trojans with his Trojan horse, befuddled the man-eating Cyclops and withstood the deadly song of the sirens.

Though he was clearly pre-Christian, I considered the wandering King of Ithaca as a patron saint. There was no trap he couldn’t escape with his wits. His story has shaped Western literature — as well as “Star Trek” — for some 3,000 years.

But there is one thing Odysseus may not be able to withstand:

The woke culture.

The political left and the growing #disrupttexts movement — fueled by critical race theory — in American public schools wants him gone.

Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State group and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.

There is something quite barbarous about it all.

Just a few days ago, zealots in San Francisco began stripping “offensive names” from public schools. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even Democratic U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is a living witness to her own cancellation.

The stripping of names are public events. They pit aging, worried traditional liberals against a radical leftist movement that will devour them as surely as the relentless Bolsheviks devoured the more moderate Mensheviks.

But the purging of great literature often takes place quietly, among woke teachers and librarians. If the classics aren’t exactly banned outright or burned, they have another way: