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Why does one book get translated while another does not? The answers are as various as the books themselves. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s And from There You Shall Seek (Ktav, April), for one example, was drafted in the 1940s but not published in Hebrew until 1978. Two of Soloveitchik’s other long essays from the 1940s, “Halakhic Man” and “The Lonely Man of Faith,” both translated in the 1980s, have become classic introductions to modern Orthodox thought. So why no translation until now of “Uvikashtem Misham,” the essay that completes this crucial set? Probably because so many of the people inclined to read a weighty Orthodox theological essay have the skills to read it in Hebrew.

Quite another story is Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Normance (Dalkey Archive, May), a novel first published in French in 1954. The influence of Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan on the style of modern American literature, from Henry Miller to Joseph Heller, cannot be denied, but neither can the blistering anti-Semitism of the pamphlets he published during the run-up to World War II and the occupation of France. Though he began to write it in Denmark, where he was jailed as a Nazi collaborator, Normance is not one of Céline’s most notoriously hateful propagandistic texts, but a fragmented, invented description of the bombardment of Paris by the Royal Air Force in 1944. It’s not surprising that half a century elapsed before the book appeared in English. The politics of publishing an avowed anti-Semite aren’t exactly simple: who will be paid the royalties on Normance, even today? And will the complete rendering of Céline’s oeuvre into English mitigate the effect of his wartime propaganda?

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Speaking of cultured anti-Semites, we can blame them, starting with Richard Wagner, for making music inherently political for Jews, but at the same time we should acknowledge that music has never existed outside politics as simply a collection of abstract, pleasurable sounds and rhythms. Consider Psalm 137, in which the exiled Israelites hang up their harps, asking, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

A similar question might have been on the minds of composers and conductors like Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, and Otto Klemperer, who in their exiles from Nazi-controlled territories in the 1930s wound up in and around Los Angeles. Dorothy Lamb Crawford, a musician and musicologist, tells the stories of such refugee artists in A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigres and Exiles in Southern California (Yale, May).

Bizarre as their Californian exile may have seemed to former paragons of high German musical culture, it was certainly preferable to the fate of Jewish musicians under the Nazis. One such unfortunate was Zhanna Arshanskaya, a teenage prodigy at the Kharkov Conservatory of Music; her son, Orlando Sentinel columnist Greg Dawson, describes her ordeal in Hiding in the Spotlight: A Musical Prodigy’s Story of Survival, 1941-1946 (Pegasus, July). Like many of the composers who ended up in L.A., Arshanskaya finally found a safe haven on an American university campus, in Bloomington, Indiana.

Even without a genocidal dictator peering over their shoulders, many American Jews have found reasons to turn their musical careers into political platforms. Leonard Bernstein, for example, rose to national fame on November 14, 1943, when he substituted for his boss, Bruno Walter, and conducted the New York Philharmonic. A bisexual Zionist and an unconventional performer, Bernstein revealed just how complex a political act the composing or conducting of a symphony can be. Based on a stack of FBI files and Bernstein’s correspondence, Barry Seldes’s Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (California, May) recounts the battles fought by an unusual partisan.

Even the poppiest music isn’t politically neutral. For one thing, Jews have profited from their engagements with African-American musical genres from the times when Irving Berlin was rumored to keep a “little colored boy,” who wrote all his music, locked in a closet, to the rise of Matisyahu. Is this cultural fusion, or the exploitation of poor African-American performers by rich Jewish record producers? That old debate may not be the explicit subject of Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, June), by songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller with the help of prolific autobiographical collaborator (and “Sexual Healing” co-lyricist) David Ritz, but the book offers another set of characters to consider. What on earth was Big Mama Thornton thinking, for instance, when she bought “Hound Dog,” that classic blues number later made famous by Elvis Presley, from two Jewish R&B-loving kids from Baltimore and Long Island? That Leiber and Stoller wrote many classic rock ‘n’ roll numbers, as well as “Love Potion No. 9,” reminds us again how tricky it is to categorize a genre of music as “black” or “Jewish.”

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Long before innovative websites like ritualwell.org and books like Vanessa Ochs’s Inventing Jewish Ritual, E. M. Broner was already rewriting Jewish ceremonies from a radical feminist perspective. In her experimental novel A Weave of Women and in The Women’s Haggadah, Broner has translated the spirit of the counterculture, second-wave feminism, and the havurah movement into resonant prose. She returns this spring with The Red Squad (Pantheon, May), a novel about adjunct faculty members and political dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s, and where they’ve ended up in our post-9/11 era.

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J.D. Salinger’s lawsuit against the publishers of an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye (1951) puts a famous name, if not quite a face, on the question of copyright extension. Should any hack be allowed to dream up and publish the further adventures of Holden Caulfield, or should Salinger retain that exclusive right? Prior to 1976, American copyright law offered a maximum of 56 years of protection to literary works, meaning that open season on Salinger’s beloved novel would have begun two years ago. The current law, passed in 1998, extended that protection to the author’s life plus 70 years, so Holden won’t be fair game until 2079, plus however many more years the 90-year-old Salinger lives. And if Mark Helprin, veteran of the Israeli army, crotchety contrarian, and author of Refiner’s Fire and A Dove of the East gets his way, we will have to wait even longer than that for Holden’s further adventures, and for inevitable hackwork sequels like Augie March Is a Zayde! and Marjorie Morningstar: Menopause. Helprin rants and raves against copyright minimalists in Digital Barbarism (Harper, April), proposing that Congress extend copyright as far as possible, even infinitely, because “no good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property.” The copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig disagrees—as does Jewish law, which protects intellectual property but for relatively limited terms—but at least Helprin can count on Salinger’s concurrence.

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.