STOCKHOLM--Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish author, received the Nobel Prize for literature yesterday.

The Swedish Academy of Letters cited the 74-year-old Polish-born novelist and short-story writer, a naturalized American citizen, for his "impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish tradition, brings universal human conditions to life."

In awarding the $165,000 prize, the academy likened Singer's works of "apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy" to those of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

He has written a dozen novels, children's books, memoirs, and numerous short-stories, many of which have appeared in the "New Yorker."

He wrote almost all of his work in Yiddish, and later translated it into English, either by himself or with the aid of others.