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Like many writers' desks, Singer's is cluttered. There are piles of letters, some handwritten in varying degrees of legibility, others formal, bearing the headings of foundations, charitable or scholarly. There are books and learned magazines in several languages. A note of frivolity is provided by a stapler in the form of a turtle. The one thing that makes this clutter unmistakably Singer's is the presence of two typewriters, one a conventional portable, the other 43-year-old Remington with characters in Yiddish.

Singer acquired his Yiddish Remington shortly after he arrived in this country in 1935, a year after his older brother, Israel J. Singer, whose novels, like Yoshe Kalb and The Brothers Ashkenazi, were widely praised and read during the Thirties and Forties. The younger Singer had his stories published in the Jewish Daily Forward during the Forties, when its first-generation immigrant readership was rapidly dwindling. It was not until the early Fifties, largely due to the encouragement of literary critic Irving Howe, that Bashevis was introduced to English readers. Saul Bellow translated his haunting story Gimpel the Fool for an anthology of Yiddish writing edited by Howe, which was published around the same time as one of Singer's major novels, The Family Moskat. Though Singer's work was enthusiastically reviewed, he was still out of sync - this was a period when American Jewish writers were dealing with questions of assimilation, not erotic implications of the kabbala.

By the Sixties, Singer's literary virtues were finally appreciated. His stories appeared in The New Yorker and were translated into every major language. (Singer has often found it curious that the first translations of his work are not into European languages, but into Japanese: "Maybe they find in me a kindred spirit," he says, noting that recently he has also become available in pirate editions in Korea.) The culmination of this painfully slow progress from obscurity to international acclaim came in 1978, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (To honor the only one of its contributors to win a Nobel, the Forward sent a reporter to Stockholm to cover the ceremony, but since the tiny circulation daily couldn't afford to have the story cabled back, the reporter wrote his coverage in advance, a detail that might be considered improbable even in a Singer novel.)

Is it harder to work in the full glare of celebrity than to write in a dead language for a dying readership? Singer smiles. "I would like to be original and say I liked it better then. But I like it better now. Some of my Yiddish readers were very primitive. Now I keep on getting letters from professors, from scientists. It gives me satisfaction."

For a long time Singer was a pariah even in the tightly circumscribed Yiddish world. "The Yiddish literary tradition was sentimental and psychological. The Yiddish critics used to scold me because I wasn't in 'the tradition.' At that time 'the tradition' meant stories about the poor against the rich, about the poor against the rich, about Yeshiva boys who fall in love with rich girls. Some of the Yiddish writers were Marxists, some socialists. I call them psychologizers, sociologizers. Imps didn't jibe with their 'tradition.' In a way I was for them a complete puzzle. I still am, but since I have succeeded, they have made their peace with me."

International recognition has done little to change Singer. It has made his schedule even busier - he has to make more time to receive admirers bestowing honors, plaques or simply expressions of affection. As far as the theatre goes, even Nobel Prize winners have to make revisions.

Singer is more involved with Teibele than he was with Yentl, the play with which he made his Broadway debut four years ago. Yentl was based on a screenplay he had written. Teibele, based on a short story, was intended as a theatre piece. (It received its world premiere in 1978 at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis.) Singer thinks it is silly to compare the two forms - "It's like being disappointed that a young man of 21 no longer resembles the baby he was at two." His primary concern with the play is the text, though he does not perceive it the way the performers do: "They're always demanding changes. They have problems where I don't see any problem. The actors will say they can't use this word. The director tells me there's too little action, too little conflict. Writing a play is very difficult. You have to create a whole world in two hours." [[image: right-pointing arrow]]
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