Isaac Bashevis Singer Dies; Yiddish Culture’s Archivist : Novelist: His tales of traditional Jewish life included “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy.” He won Nobel Prize in 1978.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of the few--and unquestionably the most popular--of the guardians of the 1,000-year-old Yiddish language, died Wednesday in a Miami nursing home, his wife said.

The 1978 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was 87 and had been ill for several months, Alma Singer said. He had divided his time between New York and a home in Surfside, Fla.

In addition to his wife, Singer is survived by a son, Israel Zamir, and four grandchildren.

At his death he had become an anomaly--a simple teller of stories, who wrote about traditional Jewish folk in an era when literary self-consciousness had enveloped most of his contemporaries.

He wrote, until his final illness, in splendid isolation--tending a mythical universe inhabited by his own creations, dismissing psychological lore and stream-of-consciousness techniques as the efforts of writers “always babbling about oneself.”

“When the writer becomes the center of his attention,” he wrote shortly after the Nobel made him an author popular outside his devoted legions of Jewish fans, “he becomes a nudnik. And a nudnik who believes he’s profound is even worse than just a plain nudnik. “

From that no-nonsense sense of self and humanity came such Singer classics as “Gimpel the Fool,” “Satan in Goray,” “The Magician of Lublin,” “The Slave,” “Enemies, A Love Story” and, thanks to Hollywood and Barbra Streisand, perhaps his best known if not his best, “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy.”

Although some critics found fault with the primitive instincts that propelled Singer’s characters through their seas of demons, pretentiousness was never an issue in the Republic of Letters he ruled from his small apartment in New York City.

Pretense?

“God forbid!” one of his wizened old Jews would have said.

For the author of “The Family Moskat”--a novel serialized in the 1950s in New York’s Jewish Daily Forward, which provided Singer his first American audience--was shaped by the Old World culture he was to chronicle throughout his life. And reality, not affectation, was the Old World order for the Jews of Europe’s ghettos.

Born in Radzymin, Poland--then under control of the Russian czars--Singer’s grandfathers were rabbis and his father a Hasidic scholar. The boy, his brother and sister were raised in a ghetto tenement that also served as his father’s Beth Din, or rabbinical court, where advice on religious and domestic disputes was disseminated daily in Yiddish.

Singer thus learned at a young age of the philosophies of his faith and the despair and dreams of those who practiced it.

Yiddish is a 1,000-year-old form of German developed by Jews using their Hebrew alphabet and incorporating the Hebrew and Aramaic words of their ancestors. To that amalgamation was added the language of whatever country the religious nomads happened to occupy. Thus it became a bewildering mix of English, Russian, Polish and other tongues which spread throughout Eastern Europe with the widening migration of Jews in the 19th Century.

It evolved to become the daily business language of the Jew, with Hebrew reserved for sacred or ceremonial occasions. And it was in Yiddish that young Singer read the translations of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as he developed into a modern Jew in a traditional home.

The man who was to be the 20th Century’s best-known teller of tales in that now dying idiom was both fascinated and challenged by those years in the Beth Din.

“I was born with the feeling that I am part of an unlikely adventure, something that couldn’t have happened but happened just the same,” he told an interviewer in 1965 as his fame in America was spreading. “The astonishment that came over me when I began to read Jewish history has not forsaken me to this day.”

Unknown to Singer at that point in his life, he had set upon a path--influenced by an older brother, who had begun to paint and write--that was to make him the archivist of his Yiddish culture.

In the 1920s he moved to Warsaw, joining his brother as a proofreader with a Yiddish literary journal. Writing in Hebrew, he began to critique books and publish articles in other small Warsaw publications. But since many of his fellow Jews were unable to read the classic Jewish tongue, he reverted to the language of his childhood, Yiddish.

He also translated from German to Yiddish such popular novels as Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.”

By 1932, he had become an editor of Globus, another Yiddish literary magazine. That periodical soon contained “Satan in Goray,” the first novel by Isaac Bashevis (adapted from his mother’s first name, Bathsheba) Singer. (He had been born Icek-Hersz-Zynger.) It was set in a 17th-Century shtetl , or small town, and its protagonist was an aging woman whose hallucinations were more satanic than messianic.

The woman was dominated by superstition, plagued by sexual excesses and savaged by psychic violence. She was the seminal Jew occupying a profane Earth while anguishing over the often unfulfilled promises of Yahweh.

It was germinal Singer which, over the years, became vintage Singer.

By 1935, the dangers posed to Jews in Europe by Hitler’s Nazi machine forced him to choose between the literary life he enjoyed and his personal safety. He followed his older brother, Israel, a fellow writer Singer called “my master,” to New York, leaving a wife and son, who later migrated to Palestine.

He arrived in a strange land knowing only three words of English: “Take a chair.”

He told the New York Times more than 30 years later that he never even had an opportunity to use that expression “because there was only one camping chair in my furnished room and no one visited me.”

He became despondent and did not write for nearly a decade, despairing that “Yiddish literature was dead” (in America).

He courted and, in 1938, wed a German Jew but was unable to persuade her that “I was a writer.” His only published work was “Satan in Goray,” written in Yiddish, a language his bride, Alma, could not read.

He continued to eke out a living as a free-lance Yiddish writer for the Daily Forward and he and his wife were able to move from his ghetto-like existence into a series of rented rooms to Upper Manhattan. Soon, he became a full-time staff member of the Daily Forward.

On the limited-circulation newspaper he was encouraged to resume his own Yiddish writings and in 1945--a year after his brother’s death--he felt comfortable enough to begin “The Family Moskat.” The novel, which many say derived its structure from Israel Singer’s earlier social works, spans the breakup of a prominent Jewish family in Warsaw in the half-century that preceded the 1939 Nazi invasion.

It was serialized in the Forward from 1945 to 1948 and broadcast weekly on an ethnic Jewish radio station and in 1950 was presented to publisher Alfred Knopf, who had it translated into English.

Praised for its unsentimental look at Polish-Jewish life in the 20th Century, where political expediency and survival overcome religious tradition, its success brought forth an English translation of the earlier “Satan in Goray.” Now not only Singer’s wife but tens of thousands in the English-speaking world finally were able to read it.

In 1958, Saul Bellow translated “Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories” into English and Singer, said a glowing review in the New York Times, “took his place with the epic story tellers, transcending geographical and chronological boundaries.”

Set, as always, in the 19th Century shtetls and ghettos of Singer’s fecund imagination, the humorous and affectionate tales dwelt with the often sexual and sometimes spiritual foibles of Jews trying to span the temptations of modernity.

“The Magician of Lublin” followed in 1960, a story of a ribald circus performer with centuries of Jewish tradition behind him and years of temptation ahead.

Singer’s novels and collections of short stories began to appear almost annually: “The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories” in 1961, “The Slave” in 1962 and several more through the ‘60s.

In 1975, a play based on his “Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy” was produced on Broadway to passing interest--despite its unusual theme of a Jewish girl who has to pose a boy in order to study the Torah.

When Streisand made it a film vehicle for herself nearly 10 years later, Singer said after seeing the picture that “Streisand is always present while poor Yentl is absent.”

“Enemies, a Love Story,” a story of love and pathos among World War II concentration camp survivors resettled in New York, was a highly praised film of 1989.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Singer had produced more than 20 novels and collections of short stories; three plays; an autobiography, “In My Father’s Court,” and a lengthy series of children’s stories.

He continued to bring to life the long-dead Jews of his youth, painting his often wailing, sometimes laughing mini-miscreants on a canvas that stretched across the ages.

Perhaps the successes were the result of the storyteller’s unwillingness to put himself between the character and the reader.

“Events never become stale,” he once wrote. “Commentary is stale from the very beginning. Commentary has almost destroyed the literature of our present century.”

He did not believe the Nobel Prize would ever come to a man who wrote in a language incomprehensible to most of the literary world. When he won in 1978, he asked the man who notified him, “Are you sure?”

He said in 1986 that the prize “did not really change me; it changed the public.”

He said he now found himself running “from the telephone to my manuscript and from my manuscript to the telephone.”

Nobel or no, Singer told the New York Times in one of his last interviews, “I’ve always felt I’ve never done well. I’ve always felt I should I should have done better. It was true when I was 30. It is true at 81.

“Only today I know better what I’m doing when I write. When I was 20 years old I didn’t know what I was doing.”

The one thing he always knew, of course, was Yiddish.

In 1961, as he first was becoming known outside the New York community, he was asked why he continued to work in a dying language.

His response: “I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language.”