For more than two decades after his death in 1982, Inna Hecker Grade (pronounced GRAH-duh) cantankerously repulsed almost all efforts to translate or publish his work or sift through his papers.

But Mrs. Grade died on May 2 at 85, and now the contents of the Grades’ book-cluttered second-floor apartment in the north Bronx may soon be opened to scholars and publishers. Because Mrs. Grade died without a will or survivors, the Bronx public administrator is charged with overseeing her estate. Four institutions have been invited to examine her husband’s papers and determine their literary and monetary value. Each has been asked to make competitive proposals for how the papers should be preserved or disposed of.

The four are the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan; the New York Public Library; the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass.; and Harvard University, through its Yiddish scholar, Ruth R. Wisse. Mrs. Grade blocked access to Grade’s papers by some of these very institutions, so there is a certain paradox in the idea that they might gain control of his work — and possibly unearth a never-published manuscript.

“This is our thrilling moment in Yiddish literature, this is our Dead Sea Scrolls,” said Aaron Lansky, president of the book center, which collects tens of thousands of Yiddish books and distributes them to libraries.

Grade grew up in Vilna, now Vilnius, the intellectually vibrant “Jerusalem of Lithuania”; studied in yeshivas but grew disenchanted with Orthodox Judaism; and wrote poetry as part of a fabled Yiddish literary circle, Yung Vilne. When the Nazis occupied Vilna, he fled east and was to learn that his first wife and mother perished. He met Inna Hecker, and in 1948 they immigrated to New York, where he made a living as a riveting lecturer and writer serialized in Yiddish newspapers.

Several works were translated into English. The two-volume novel “The Yeshiva” explores a headmaster’s painful struggles with faith and morality. The memoir “My Mother‘s Sabbath Days” poignantly recalls his widowed mother, who peddled fruit to survive in Vilna; his own ordeals of flight in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and the desolation he felt upon finding Jewish Vilna destroyed and coming across haunting remnants like a pediatrician’s scale. “Rabbis and Wives” is a collection of three novellas. But most of his prewar poetry remains untranslated.

John Gross, in a 1986 review of the memoir, called him a “poet with a firm grip on reality.” Some critics thought that his austere portrayals more authentically reflected Eastern European life than Isaac Bashevis Singer’s did, but Singer, with a leprechaunish charm that leavened his bleakest stories, appealed more to American audiences.

“He played to the galleries and learned how to handle his readership,” Dr. Wisse said. “That was not Grade’s style. He wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Perhaps as a consequence, Grade never achieved the popularity among English-language readers that Singer did. According to Ashbel Green, who was his editor at Alfred A. Knopf and is retired, Grade’s novels never sold more than 10,000 copies apiece. Schocken Books, an imprint of Random House specializing in Jewish-theme works, published paperbacks of two Grade works; Altie Karper, editorial director of Schocken, said, “There was enormous interest in Chaim Grade in his lifetime — and more now.”

Jonathan Brent, executive director of YIVO, the leading archive of Jewish materials from Eastern Europe, said his group would like to inventory the contents of Grade’s home, exhibit the materials and start the process of publishing them.

Jay Ziffer, a lawyer for the public administrator, declined to discuss letters he had sent to the institutions, but people who received them read their contents to The New York Times. The public administrator was first notified of the significance of the apartment’s papers by Dr. Ralph Speken, a psychiatrist, and Brad Silver, a social worker, who both cared for Mrs. Grade in her final months.

“I told them there were great treasures in that apartment,” Dr. Speken said. “They should take over that apartment as if they were taking over King Tut’s tomb.”

Mel Rosenthal, a retired Knopf copy editor, said he had been working for more than two decades on translating galleys of a Grade novel titled “The Rabbi’s House” that may never have been published in Yiddish. And he said Mrs. Grade had told him that there were other manuscripts that were never published.

Scholars say she maintained a fierce conviction that almost no translator could do her husband justice. “This is all about possession,” said the writer Cynthia Ozick, who translated Grade poetry and has written about the resistance of Joseph Conrad’s widow to publishing her husband’s work. “I and I alone possessed this man. I have this inner knowledge. It’s a kind of greed, a kind of hoarding greed.

Dr. Allan Nadler, professor of Jewish studies at Drew University, was a student of Grade’s in the 1970s, and developed a friendship with him. Mrs. Grade was so jealous of his time, Dr. Nadler said, that Grade would have to call him on the sly while his wife was out shopping. Although the couple seemed in love, he said, they had a stormy relationship. Other scholars and editors described long-winded, angry messages she left on answering machines after midnight, often including denunciations of Singer. Mr. Rosenthal attributes her “profound emotional insecurity” to her father’s having been a victim of Stalin’s purges.

Despite all that and the dwindling of the Yiddish press, Dr. Nadler said, Grade kept writing. “Even when he was having lunch, he was always scribbling,” he said. “He used to say, ‘I’m always writing, but there’s nowhere to publish anymore.’ ”

Indeed, the Grades’ two-bedroom apartment was cluttered with stacks of books and envelopes filled with papers in addition to herbal medicines. Mr. Silver, executive director of the Bronx Jewish Community Council and who effectively became Mrs. Grade’s caseworker because she cooperated with no one else, said the apartment was so cluttered that when emergency medical technicians arrived to take her to the hospital in January, they couldn’t get a gurney inside and had to carry her into the corridor.

“My purpose was to figure out how I was going to clear away books so when she came home with a walker, she’d be able to get into the apartment,” he said.

When she was buried next to her husband in Riverside Cemetery in Saddle Brook, N.J., only four people attended the graveside ceremony, including Mr. Silver and Dr. Speken. Mr. Silver said before falling ill with diverticulitis, Mrs. Grade spoke of sending Grade’s papers to scholars in Poland — explicitly not to American scholars — but never did so.

“She waited until she absolutely had to because she didn’t want to give it up,” he said.