Jews played many less well-known roles in modern German popular culture. Marline Otte surveys Jews’ performances in Germany’s circuses, Yiddish-language theaters, and revue theaters in her study—soon available, as a print-on-demand paperback, for a whopping $73 off the 2006 hardcover price—titled Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, February). Otte takes farces and pratfalls seriously, “exploring the astonishing subtlety in the humor and art of the barely literate, of those German Jews who spoke in unfamiliar ways, turning their bodies into metaphors.”

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While Otte’s clowns and comedians are long forgotten, their literary counterparts earned worldwide attention. Franz Werfel, the expressionist playwright who attended school with Kafka in Prague, has now had his final untranslated novel rendered into English as Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand (David R. Godine, December). Werfel started writing this tale of a married Austrian diplomat and the Jewish girl he once loved in 1940, after anti-Semitism forced him to flee Vienna; by year’s end, he found his way to—where else?—Hollywood. Werfel’s contemporary, and fellow adoptive Californian, Thomas Mann, likewise inspires a perpetual frenzy of translations, scholarly studies, and critical reevaluations. For example, Todd Kontje’s Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Michigan, December) reconsiders Mann’s Jewish characters in the context of his engagements with German imperialism and racism and in light of some nasty remarks that have surfaced in the Nobel laureate’s letters and diaries.

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It is a tragic irony, but no surprise, that German literary postmodernism likewise takes Jewishness as a core concern—especially because that postmodernism can be understood as originating in the Nazis’ concentration camps, where, somewhat astonishingly, a few brave souls found the energy to write verse. Now available in an affordable paperback, Andrés Nader’s Traumatic Verses: On Poetry in German from the Concentration Camps, 1933-1945 (Camden House, December) not only offers sharp analysis of such poetry but also includes an appendix with the full text of these poems in both German and English.

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It didn’t take very long, after the war, for aesthetic experimentalism and the trauma of the Holocaust to coalesce into postmodernist fiction. What has taken longer is for American critics to accept this as a fact of literary history: As recently as 2009, a New York Times reviewer evinced surprise that H.G. Adler used “the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews” in a style that “could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation if ever there was one.” Improbable? In what sense is that improbable? Adler—a Prague native who unlike Werfel did not manage to escape and spent years in Theresienstadt and two weeks in Auschwitz—embraced such a literary approach not only in 1962’s The Journey (the subject of that Times review), but even earlier in Panorama (Random, January), which he began to write in 1948, though it went unpublished until 1968.

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By now, Holocaust postmodernism is ubiquitous not only in the form of novels but also in big-budget movies. William Donahue’s Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s Nazi Novels and Their Films (Palgrave, December) explores one of the most widely circulated examples, Schlink’s The Reader (1995), tracking its reception—it earned Oprah’s seal of approval, cementing its status as a massive international bestseller even before Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes signed on to star in the Hollywoodization—and contextualizing it among the author’s other works.

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The colossal sales of books like Schlink’s must be one of the primary reasons that translations from the German continue to appear in the United States with unusual regularity. Among the latest such publications is Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love (Norton, January), a fictionalized memoir by the granddaughter of Jews who survived the war. Like several recent books written in English, the book tells the tale of Hungarian Jews—in this case, a couple who, having survived Nazism and communism, committed suicide in 1991. “Is it typically Jewish,” the author wonders, “to kill yourself after you have survived the Holocaust—so then you determine for yourself how you want to die?” And, one could add, is it now typically Hungarian Jewish to reimagine into literary prose the lives of one’s forebears?

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel’s oppressive treatment of Gaza’s Palestinians—Turkey’s righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel’s distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems. Those problems, which include Turkey’s repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world’s worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

While there remains a narrative among opinion-makers like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that frames Turkey as an exemplary friend and a real democracy, Jews should wrestle with some truths about past and present realities. Jews, like Christians, lived as designated infidels under the Ottomans, often under harsh and repressive laws; Zionists were jailed and killed outright by the Turkish government through the end of World War I (Palestine was under Ottoman rule then). The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, said more than once that he feared that the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks awaited the Jews next. It remains uncomfortable for Jews to recall that Turkey supplied the Nazis with large amounts of chromium during World War II, a mineral that was used, among other things, for killing in concentration camps. And today a virulent anti-Semitism has spread throughout Turkey so that recently a banner of the Islamic Saadet Party read: “Legendary leader Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit.”

It’s a strange irony that in recent decades Israeli and Jewish diasporan groups have colluded with Turkey’s aggressive policy of denying and rewriting the history of the Armenian Genocide. In this equation the Armenian past has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and Israel, which have a regional partnership based on reciprocal needs. Turkey is an important source of Israel’s water supply and at least until recently, had been a friendly Muslim ally in a hostile region. Israel supplies Turkey with high-powered weapons, and the lucrative military manufacturing deals are important to Israel’s economy.

In 1982—by threatening the lives and livelihoods of Jews in Turkey—Turkey pressured the Israeli government to stop a genocide studies conference in Tel Aviv, at which a group of scholars were giving papers on the Armenian Genocide. As a result the Israeli government pulled out its support, Elie Wiesel decided he could not participate, and the conference was moved to an out-of-the-way location and was greatly diminished. In the 1990s, two Armenian documentaries that were to be aired on Israeli TV—one of them about the Armenian community of Jerusalem—were canceled at the last minute because of Turkish pressure. From 1989 on, Jewish-American organizations have worked at Ankara’s request to help stop a simple, non-binding Armenian Genocide resolution from passing in the U.S. Congress. When former Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid declared 10 years ago that he wanted to institute a new history curriculum with a chapter on genocide that would have “a broad reference to the Armenian genocide,” he was rebuked by his government and shortly thereafter left office.

In recent years, the Israeli government has mimicked at times the Turkish government’s propaganda about 1915. Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, went as far as to say: “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” Peres’ crude denial elicited angry responses from Israeli scholars, and Israel Charny, the director of the Institute on Genocide in Jerusalem, crystallized the anger of many when he replied: “As a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”

The question remains: Is aiding Turkey’s denial of a genocidal past something Israel can continue to do? And at what cost? Amos Elon, writing in Haaretz about the “hypocrisy, opportunism, and moral trepidation” of Israeli collusion with Turkey, put it well when he asked: “But where is the boundary between the natural chauvinism of exploitation and the cheap opportunism of hypocrisy? What happens when the survivors of one Holocaust make political deals over the bitter memory of the survivors of another Holocaust?”

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While political events provide opportunities for moments of reform, change, or introspection, it is not crass opportunism, I believe, that should dictate a change in Israeli policy on the Armenian Genocide. Rather, might this be a time—when the ironies of history have surfaced in the wake of the flotilla episode—for Israel and some Jewish diasporan organizations to rethink the moral concession Israel has made in this ethical arena—not as revenge against Turkey, but as thoughtful reflection on painful truths?

Given Turkey’s relentless campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and insinuate its own extreme national narrative into democratic societies around the world, Israel’s call for the genocide’s proper and long overdue recognition would have important ethical meaning. It would, among other things, be a redress to genocide denial in general. As scholars have noted, denial is the final stage of genocide. The distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written that “denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews … strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

Recognizing the Armenian Genocide would allow Israel to embrace the deeply rooted relationship between Jews and Armenians in the modern age. When Hitler exhorted his military advisers eight days before invading Poland in 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he made it clear that he was both inspired by what the Young Turk government had done to the Armenians in 1915 and also noted that because the memory of what had been the most well-reported human rights catastrophe of the first quarter of the 20th century had been washed away, it was easier to commit genocide again.

Hitler learned a good deal from the genocide of the Armenians because Germany was Turkey’s wartime ally, and there was a great deal of documentation from German foreign officers and other German personnel in Turkey at the time. There are, of course, parallels—in bureaucratic organization, killing squad implementation, race ideology, and more—between the two events. Yet what ties Jews to Armenians even more deeply is the powerful role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining Turkey’s genocide.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s life remains a crucial part of the history of rescue and resistance during the Armenian Genocide. As U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he had the courage to step outside his prescribed role as ambassador and confront Pashas Talaat and Enver—the two major architects of the plan; he implored both the U.S. and German governments to intercede and stop the mass killing of the Armenian population; and he was a primary force in helping to organize the first major relief campaign for the Armenians in the United States.

In the end Morgenthau would lose his job because of his stance on the Armenians. After leaving Turkey in 1916 and noting that it would remain “a place of unutterable horror” for him, he included in his acclaimed World War I memoir of 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the first full narrative about the Armenian Genocide in English.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian Jewish novelist who escaped Hitler’s death list by a hair in 1934, wrote the first major novel about the Armenian Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted Armenian resistance to massacre in a small mountain village; it was also a novel that was a specific warning to the Jews of Europe about what might happen to them. The Nazis banned and burned the book in 1934, but the novel would inspire Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and became an important text in the educational curriculum for Jews in Palestine and then Israel.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the word genocide, was the first to use the term Armenian Genocide in the early 1940s—noting that it was the precise term for intended group destruction of the Armenians in 1915. He underscored that the concept “genocide” derived from his understanding of the acts committed against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Jews in the 1940s: “Examples of genocide,” he wrote in 1949, “are the destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction of the Jews in the second World War.” He also noted in his autobiography that his study of the Armenian massacres was a turning point in his life’s work.

In the modern era, the contributions to the Armenian Genocide discourse made by Jewish scholars both in Israel and worldwide has been extraordinary, and a list would be long and include Elie Wiesel, Robert Jay Lifton, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Melson, Jay Winter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, and Yair Auron, who wrote The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Recently, the Center For Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York put on brilliant exhibitions on the lives of both Raphael Lemkin and Henry Morgenthau—in which the Armenian genocide figured significantly.

Given this long-standing record of Jewish engagement and intellectual achievement concerning the Armenian Genocide, and the deep ties between the two cultures—it would seem an organic thing for Israel to finally say: The game is over. The truth of history, the meaning of genocide, the importance of ethical memory is a defining part of Jewish intellectual tradition and identity. And, in the Armenian case, the two genocidal histories commingle in deep and historical ways. As for fear of Turkey? The other 20 countries (including France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, and Canada) that have passed Armenian Genocide resolutions have witnessed Turkey’s initial diplomatic anger, an ambassador recalled for a short time, and then it’s been back to business as usual—proving that the hysteria passes and life goes on.

The Israeli government could recognize the Armenian Genocide by honoring the words of the great founding genocide scholar Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his own family to the Nazis. In August 1950, Lemkin wrote to a colleague: “Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.”

As for Armenians, in the midst of this, they look on with bewilderment, anger, bitterness. For the sizable meaning and historical significance of the genocide committed against them, they feel endlessly embattled in the effort to preserve the truthful memory of what happened to them. It seems to most Armenians that the accurate memory of their history is an ethical necessity, a minimal thing to ask others to affirm in the face of the continued assault on historical truth by Turkey. Israel’s affirmation would be of distinct ethical importance given the common experience the two peoples have shared. For Israel, colluding with a denialism is too painfully ironic.

Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, among other books.

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Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.