The Dybbuk Made Him Do It : SCUM <i> By Isaac Bashevis Singer translated from the Yiddish by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 195 pp.) </i>

The storytelling of Isaac Bashevis Singer has, by now, achieved the quality of a mantra. “Scum,” the latest work to reach print in English translation, has all the familiar phrasings of I.B.S.’ lifelong meditation on the mysteries that manifest themselves in ordinary human experience: A man, rich but tormented, is driven by some demonic force to hurl himself against the fixed objects of the moral universe--love, marriage, family, faith, even the Almighty Himself.

“Something had stuck fast in his soul,” Singer writes in “Scum,” a short novel first serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward in 1967 (and only now ably translated into English by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz). “Sorrow, regret, and shame possessed him like a dybbuk. . . . At the age of forty-seven, it was Max’s fate to wander about without a purpose.”

“Scum” is the tale of Max Barabander, a veteran of the Warsaw underworld who makes his fortune in Argentina and then returns to Poland shortly after the Revolution of 1905. Max suffers from what we might call a mid-life crisis--he is 47, impotent, balding, jaded, bored--but it is the untimely death of his 17-year-old son that throws him into a blind panic.

“His nerves were tormenting him,” Singer writes of Max Barabander. “One moment they were quiet, the next they were agitated as if by an internal demon who gets inside a person and plays tricks on him. Just when you think you’ve vanquished the demons, they stick out their tongues.”

Max travels to Warsaw in the desperate hope of redeeming his life--”a tangle of lies and swindles”--by searching out his long-lost friends and family, and by paying a visit to the graves of his mother and father. But the more urgent instrument of his salvation--or so he fancies--turns out to be the adolescent daughter of a Warsaw rabbi, the virginal but fiery Tsirele.

Of course, nothing is ever so simple--not in life, and not in the vast tapestry of Singer’s work. I.B.S. does not, after all, dabble in mere fairy tales, no matter how many dybbuks we may encounter along the way. “No, this isn’t love but stubbornness,” Max says, diagnosing his own unwholesome lust for the rabbi’s daughter, “the desire to break down a wall.”

Suddenly, Max finds himself star-crossed by a veritable constellation of women. He seeks comfort (but finds no pleasure) in the arms of Esther, the willing wife of a baker who works late at the ovens. Then he takes up with Reyzl, a gangster’s moll, who proposes that the two of them go into the white-slave trade. Their first victim will be Basha, a servant girl whom Max earnestly sets out to seduce. Nothing avails, and Max only sinks deeper into his particular slough of sexual despond.

The web that Max weaves--or is it a noose drawn ever more tightly around his neck by some malevolent force?--brings him to the verge of suicide. Like many another poor soul in the world according to Singer, Max Barabander finds himself helpless victim of his own wild impulses, and he persists against all caution and all reason in ripping apart the ordinary fabric of life and love.

“The thought occurred to him that his whole life had been devoted to cheating and stealing,” Singer writes of Max. “As a boy, he had stolen from his parents and sometimes from strangers. Later he had become a thief by trade. Then he began to steal love, or whatever else you want to name it.”

The beguilement of nameless things is what “Scum” (and, in a sense, the rest of Singer’s oeuvre) are truly all about. The holy ark in the rabbi’s apartment smells of “citron, wax and something else that was nameless.” The odors of Warsaw are described as “a mixture of lilacs, sewage, tar, winds sweeping in from the Praga forests, and a something that had no name.” And the unnamed spirit that torments Max Barabander is the ultimate mystery.

Perhaps it is “the Evil One,” Singer suggests, “who paradoxically thwarted Max in his pursuit of those pleasures he had been chasing since he was old enough to stand on his feet.” Or is it the Almighty? “Someone must be in charge of this little planet,” Max ponders, “but who is he? What does he want?”

The Evil One, of course, is a ready-to-wear metaphor for all kinds of worldly ills. It’s easy (and, for some readers, comfortable) to perceive the profound spiritual crisis that permeates Singer’s work as something merely “psychological.” That’s why Singer is perceived as a modern and even a secular writer, even when he resorts to the Yiddish language to write about people and beliefs and destinies that are more nearly medieval.

When “Scum” reaches its abrupt climax--as sudden and steely as the slamming of a cell door--we may be tempted to write off Max’s ordeal as the self-willed fate of a man bent on his own destruction, or else the essentially meaningless churnings of a blind universe. But Singer refuses to abandon the God-haunted men and women in his book to such a cold and empty fate. Something is there, as Singer once titled a story.

At the end, Singer leaves us only with a shrug--but it is a deeply expressive shrug, a gesture with all the comic and ironic resonances of the Yiddish tongue. “The longer you live, the more you learn,” says Blind Mayer, “King of Krochmalna Street, rabbi of the underworld,” in an echo of Singer’s credo as a writer. “You think you know it all, but suddenly you hear something and you can’t believe your ears. It’s even mentioned somewhere in a holy book, I don’t remember where.”

Where does “Scum” rank in the body of Singer’s work? With Singer approaching the age of 87 in uncertain health, the simple fact that we are blessed with a new (or, more accurately, belated) book by the master is reason enough to celebrate. But we need not condescend in order to find a place for “Scum” in the canon.

“Scum” is not quite as surprising or sharp-edged as some of Singer’s more recent books, and it’s not quite as sublime as Singer’s most enchanting and enduring work. Even so, “Scum” is still vintage stuff: robust, assured, passionate, richly peopled and driven by the stopwatch pacing that is the unremarked strength of Singer’s storytelling.

“God’s novel has suspense,” Singer once declared, and so does “Scum.”