Starting a search for literary gold, officials from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research combed through the cluttered Bronx apartment of the esteemed Yiddish writer Chaim Grade on Tuesday to determine how to move his manuscripts and other papers to the institute’s headquarters for examination by five scholarly groups.

Mr. Grade’s widow, Inna Hecker Grade, died in May without a clear will or immediate survivors, throwing into question the disposition of the valuable papers of her husband, who died in 1982. The apartment was taken over by the Bronx public administrator’s office, which invited four and eventually five institutions to examine the papers, including YIVO.

But according to Jay Ziffer, a lawyer for the public administrator, the second-floor apartment, just south of Van Cortlandt Park, lacked air-conditioning and was so dusty that the office decided to have the papers shipped to YIVO headquarters on West 16th Street in Manhattan where the five institutions can perform a painstaking review more comfortably. (Besides YIVO, the institutions are the New York Public Library, the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., Harvard University through its Yiddish scholar Ruth R. Wisse, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.) Despite the work it is doing now, YIVO may not end up being the ultimate repository of the Grade collection.

Taking his first look at the apartment, Jonathan Brent, YIVO’s executive director, said papers were discovered in suitcases, bureau drawers and wrapped packages. “It looks like the apartment of a great writer, a tremendous literary mind, but there’s a pathos about the decrepitude and poverty and lack of air,” he said.

On a visit Tuesday, the apartment looked more like the stacks of a university library than a home. A conservator hired by YIVO, Ursula Mitra, estimated that there were 15,000 to 20,000 books in the apartment. She spent the day examining a sample of them to determine if there was mold or any bugs that might infest the YIVO collection.

Glowing with scholar’s elation at having made a rare find, Mr. Brent said the collection revealed Mr. Grade’s intellectual breadth and his desire to make a place for himself on the world stage, despite writing in a language with relatively few readers. The library contains volumes of Talmudic analysis and Yiddish translation of Schopenhauer and Spinoza as well as classics in English by Joyce, Proust and Trollope, but also such curiosities as “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.”

“As a Yiddish writer he is trying to position himself with writers like Faulkner,” Mr. Brent said of Mr. Grade. “This is not the collection of a recluse. It is a collection of a writer with tremendous intellectual ambition.”

The YIVO team has so far unearthed a dozen file boxes of original manuscripts for some of Mr. Grade’s novels, stories and poems as well as correspondence, but said it was too early to determine if there was an unpublished manuscript among the papers. They did find a handwritten elegy Mr. Grade had written for one of his yeshiva mentors.

For more than two decades after Mr. Grade’s death, his widow repulsed efforts to translate or publish his works or even comb through his papers. She found reasons to object to almost every candidate. That is why her death has produced such interest among the rarefied world of Yiddish scholars.