Tales Credible and Inevitable the Image and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 310 pages; $17.95

By Paul Gray

When Isaac Bashevis Singer's Collected Stories appeared in 1982, his legions of faithful readers had cause to celebrate and worry. On the one hand, the volume was an invaluable retrospective of the tales that had helped bring Singer an international audience and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. On the other, collections imply finality, a summing up of past work because there may be nothing more to add. Might Singer, now 80, have exhausted himself or his imagination? Was this hailing of previous accomplishments also a farewell?

The Image and Other Stories offers 22 reassuring proofs of the laureate's continuing vitality. "The instinct to create remains as long as one breathes," says an obscure Yiddish poet in one of these tales, and he obviously speaks for his author as well as for all the compulsive monologists who continue to pop up in and then dominate Singer's short stories. "Now listen," commands Aunt Yentl, who is overheard telling three different anecdotes, and only the dull or the terminally uninterested could possibly disobey.

Singer's fictional world has long consisted of three main realms, and this volume is divided pretty much equally among them. Eight stories are set in Polish villages or provincial small towns, where everyone knows everyone else's business and gossip is the preferred mode of entertainment. "There were no secrets in Krashnik," says the narrator of The Image. "People peered into keyholes and listened behind doors." Thus when the marriage between a village beauty and a bright yeshiva boy remains stubbornly unconsummated, the odd reason why cannot long escape becoming common knowledge. As before, Singer's tales of rural life reveal the complexities of so-called simple folk. In A Nest Egg for Paradise, a prosperous and pious Jew named Mendel falls victim, once, to the seductive appeals of his sister-in-law. He tries to hide his shame and suffering from the neighbors, but he brings his anguish to a rabbi in another village. "I've forfeited my share in the world to come," he confesses. The rabbi congratulates Mendel and explains, "The Master of the Universe has plenty of paid servants, but of those who would serve Him for nothing, He has hardly any at all."

Another eight stories take place in Warsaw during the early decades of this century. A few of these, like The Divorce, relate the memories of a young boy whose rabbi father dispenses spiritual and practical advice to the teeming neighborhood around Krochmalna Street. Simply paying attention to the people who come to the apartment for help trains the lad to become a writer: "I was interested in people's talk -- their expressions, their excuses for wrong deeds, and how they twisted things to suit themselves." And he or someone very like him appears in other Warsaw stories as an apprentice author, hanging around the Yiddish Writers' Club, looking for work and the experience of life.

He is seldom disappointed. Warsaw teems with the eccentric or inspired, all constantly on the prowl for a good listener. In The Bond, the narrator hears out Reuven Berger, a writer who confesses the secret behind his success with women: when they get hysterical, he pops them, and it works. "Who knows," he says, "perhaps slaps could be a cure even for some organic maladies." In The Interview, Singer's surrogate is assigned to write a magazine story on a renowned philosopher. When he meets Dr. Gabriel Levantes in his hotel room, he also encounters Machla, a poet who is trying to win a hearing for her book of erotic verses in Yiddish. The cub reporter witnesses a debate between body and soul. Machla: "Since every human being, without exception, thinks about sexual relations from the cradle to the grave, how can poetry ignore the subject?" Dr. Levantes: "Every human being? I don't think about it even one hour in a week. Neither did my great friend Professor Hermann Cohen." The young man finally gets his interview. When he leaves the hotel, he finds the poet waiting for him.

A third batch of six stories is set in Manhattan. The man who narrates these bears a close resemblance to the Singer the world has come to know. He is a Polish immigrant who supports himself by writing stories for a small newspaper in New York City. His tiny but loyal audience knows how to reach him, since he is listed in the telephone book. "I don't hide from my readers," he tells one of his admirers in Confused. Why should he? They bombard him with fresh material. "I have an unbelievable story for you," says an old woman he meets in The Secret. "A story like this happens once in a thousand years." He agrees to listen but asks, "Do me a favor and make it short." The result is brief and not unbelievable at all; in Singer's hands, even a tale of accidental incest has a way of seeming not just credible but inevitable.

Nothing in The Image and Other Stories quite matches such Singer short classics as Gimpel the Fool or Yentl the Yeshiva Boy. But the language, translated from the original Yiddish by the author and others, retains its vivid, vernacular freshness. And Singer's central subject, the colorful and infinite contrariness of human beings, shows no signs of running thin, either in reality or in this splendid addition to a remarkable career.