Storytelling, in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, is not the preserve of writers. Singer appears in much of his own fiction only as a charismatic stenographer, endlessly pursued by friends, relatives, and total strangers bursting to tell their own stories. For Singer, storytelling, like sex and magic, is a form of what he once described as a universal mania for creation: “Everything that existed wrote, painted, sculpted, and sought for creative achievement … the purpose of creation was creation.” In this endlessly fertile world, the writer is different from other men not in kind, but only in degree: He preserves the tales we are forever telling ourselves and each other.

One of Singer’s favorite storytellers is his Aunt Yentl, who appears in several recollections of his Warsaw childhood. Whenever Aunt Yentl begins a story, she warns that it is “not for the Sabbath,” a signal that something scandalous is about to follow. Of course, this warning is also a seduction, since it is exactly the secret, the shameful, and the profane that we all secretly yearn to hear. This lesson is not lost on her young nephew, who eavesdrops on her tales of sexual obsession and betrayal: “Her Sabbath fruit and stories were too great a temptation for me.”

As a grown man, Singer would go on to write stories decidedly not for the Sabbath. Few great writers, even in the 20th century, are so exclusively concerned with human perversity and unreason. Adultery, lechery, sadism, demonic possession, blasphemy, hallucination, damnation: these are Singer’s muses, to whom he remained faithful for more than half a century. Now, to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Library of America has reissued all of Singer’s short stories in three thick volumes ($35 each), totaling some 2,500 pages. Even in the absence of his major novels – “Satan in Goray,” “Shadows on the Hudson,” “Enemies: A Love Story,” and many others – these volumes offer the reader the essence of Singer.

Singer’s inclusion in the Library of America, the nearest thing we have to an American Pantheon, raises, or rather resurrects, a host of questions – not so much about his literary stature, which is beyond dispute, as about his historical and symbolic significance. For if Singer was American by adoption – he arrived here in 1935, at the age of 31, and lived mainly in Brooklyn and Manhattan until his death in 1991 – he was never really an American writer. Indeed, he is the first author in the Library of America who did not write in English; to the end of his life he wrote in his native Yiddish, while helping a series of translators produce English versions of his works. These versions had a unique authority – English, Singer wrote, was his “second original language” – and served as the basis for translations into other languages. They also had an improbable success: Singer was one of the few Yiddish writers to reach a non-Yiddish speaking audience, and the only one to become famous among non-Jews.

Starting in the 1950s, when Saul Bellow’s translation of “Gimpel the Fool” appeared in Partisan Review, Singer achieved a level of success that could only inspire intense jealousy among other Yiddish writers (a phenomenon marvelously satirized by Cynthia Ozick in her story “Envy.”) Yiddish was already doomed as a living language, dying of causes both natural (its replacement as the Jewish tongue by Hebrew in Israel and English in America) and unnatural (the annihilation of millions of its speakers in the Holocaust). Singer, however, was published by the New Yorker and Farrar Straus; saw his work turned into movies; and in 1978 won the Nobel Prize. Inevitably, this ascent was accompanied by pointed questions and criticisms. Was Singer really representative of Yiddish writing? Did he steal the oxygen from a host of talented rivals – including his older and initially more successful brother, Israel Joshua, who died in 1944? Did he adequately address the Holocaust in his work? What sort of image of Jews and Judaism did his stories offer to the world?

These issues were raised most recently in a New York Times article, where the widow of Chaim Grade – a little-known Yiddish master – issued gouts of bile: “I despise him especially because he is dragging the Jewish literature, Judaism, American literature, American culture back to the land of Moab. … I profoundly despise all those who eat the bread into which the blasphemous buffoon has urinated.” Even the Library of America edition is not unaffected by controversy. The three volumes of stories are accompanied by an “Album,” full of photos and biographical information, in which one critic declares: “I think the secret of his success was that he made absolutely no demands of his readers. … I think that was also a brilliant calculation on his part so that he could become the Jewish writer for all seasons in a culture that was basically middlebrow.”

This is a strange discord in an ostensibly celebratory volume. But the truth is that, no matter how much passion is currently raised by all these questions – political, religious, ethnic, linguistic – they are ultimately irrelevant to the fact of Singer’s achievement. “Time,” wrote W.H. Auden, “worships language, and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives.” The sentiment has never been more apt than in the case of Singer, who literally assured the survival of Yiddish into futurity by making it the local habitation of his universal genius. A century from now, Singer’s language and milieu will be remembered and studied in no small part because of him.

The Library of America edition of Singer’s stories reminds us just how strange and undomesticated an imagination he had. Although he was enormously prolific – these three volumes contain nearly 200 stories – he was drawn back time and again to the same magnetic subjects and settings. As a result, he is one of the most knowable of writers: his intimate obsessions (lust, demons, magic), as well as his personal quirks (vegetarianism, hatred of typographical errors), bob to the surface of almost every story.

Likewise, nearly every Singer story takes place in one of three locales, each corresponding to a phase of his own life. First, there is the folk-world of the Polish shtetl, where it makes little difference if the year is 1820 or 1920. This is the setting of Singer’s best work, hallucinatory allegories like “The Gentleman from Cracow,” “Something Is There,” and “A Crown of Feathers.” It is also the world of Singer’s ancestors: he spent part of his childhood in the village of Bilgoray, where his grandfather had been the rabbi for 40 years and where, he later recalled, “I had a chance to see our past as it really was. … I lived Jewish history.” As he transforms this history, with its moral sternness and fearful unreason, into a series of utterly modern psychological parables, Singer is surprisingly similar to Hawthorne. In his eroticism and pessimism, Singer often resembles the author of “The Scarlet Letter” and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” By the same token, it makes no more sense to demand that Singer provide an accurate picture of Jewish life in Eastern Europe than to turn to Hawthorne for a faithful history of New England.

The second home of Singer’s fiction is literary Warsaw between the wars. This is where, following in his older brother’s footsteps, he was initiated into the intoxicating, fratricidal world of Yiddish literature. In stories like “A Friend of Kafka,” “The House Friend,” and “The Adventure,” Singer endows that provincial Parnassus with all the glamour and intrigue of the Paris of the Goncourts. Here are the braggarts and philosophers, seducers and ideologues, that gave the young Singer his lifelong image of worldly sophistication.

The hothouse atmosphere was fuelled by the many paradoxes of Yiddish literature and culture. It was an old language with a brief history: Only in the late 19th century did writers like Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Mokher Sforim begin to make it the medium of serious secular literature. It was the lingua franca of Eastern European Jewry, but it enjoyed neither the worldly prestige of German and Russian nor the sacred status of Hebrew. And, of course, it was cut off in full flower, when the majority of its speakers were murdered by Hitler (and, Singer would be quick to add, by Stalin). The literary world Singer entered in the 1920s had to compress the whole history of a literature into about 15 years. No wonder it is lit up, in his stories, with a hectic, feverish glow.

Finally, there is Singer’s American world. America, in his stories, exists as a few neighborhoods of Yiddish speaking exiles and refugees: Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, and the Upper West Side, with outposts in Miami Beach and Buenos Aires. (Even Israel, in Singer’s work, functions largely as a suburb of this American exile.) If the shtetl represents Singer’s prehistory and Warsaw his vigorous youth, America is the afterlife: His New York stories are thick with ghosts and revenants. Even his living characters have the recklessness and hopelessness of the terminally sick. In Singer’s best American stories, like “The Cafeteria” and “A Wedding in Brownsville,” the boundary between the living and the dead – worn so thin by the nightmare of the Holocaust – disappears altogether. Of the many fictional cities that help to create the New York of the mind, Singer’s is one of the strangest, and certainly the darkest:

I have played with the idea that all humanity suffers from schizophrenia. Along with the atom, the personality of Homo sapiens has been splitting. When it comes to technology, the brain still functions, but in everything else degeneration has begun. They are all insane: the Communists, the Fascists, the preachers of democracy, the writers, the painters, the clergy, the atheists. Soon technology, too, will disintegrate. Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought that it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.