Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer would have turned 100 in July or perhaps this November. The ambiguity over Singer's birth date is not the only dispute: there are heated battles over his treatment of Jewish subject matter and questions about the reasons for Singer's popular success. Not that there is any serious objection to Singer's artistic stature: he stands as the bedeviling, but monumental, chronicler of a vanished Eastern European Jewish culture destroyed by the Nazis, a savior of the Yiddish language.

Singer left Poland for America in 1935. His career was launched by Saul Bellow's 1953 translation of the story "Gimpel the Fool." The tale's fusion of sophisticated irony and shtetl sensibility was a revelation. Singer also garnered attention for his non-traditional treatment of Jewish folk culture: he often wrote about dybbuks, ghosts, erotic obsession, and the irrational. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

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Singer explained that, for him, "literature is the story of love and fate, a description of the mad hurricane of human passions and the struggle with them." Many in the Yiddish community find his fixation on the close relationship between sex and death distasteful and calculatingly exotic. Some critics feel that the focus on Singer unfairly consigns other talented Yiddish writers to oblivion. On top of that, there are those who feel that, even though Singer supervised the translations of his writings into English, the Yiddish versions of his works should not be treated as first drafts.

Last July, the Library of America published a three-volume collection of Singer's short stories. The best tales are invaluable reminders of his value as a writer. In the stories set before WWII, singer writes about the pre-Holocaust past as if it was the present, his yarns offer a wry but elemental picture of human delusion in a world of evil. His characters are often monomaniacs, obsessed with demons within and without, often confusing the two. In his stories of survivors living sad lives in New York, Miami, and Israel after WWII, Singer effortlessly intermingles the dead and the barely living.

The wrangling over Singer's reputation will continue. It has been reported there are still novels by the prolific author to be translated. Critics say the books are being withheld because they cast Isaac Bashevis Singer in a bad light. These discussions are provocative and healthy, but the Library of America's volumes of short stories offer compelling evidence that the mad hurricane of Singer's genius will weather the counterblasts.

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