Melting Point
Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
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- $349.00
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- $349.00
Descripción editorial
One of The Washington Post's Top 10 Books of the Year
A New Yorker Essential Read
Long-listed for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
“Melting Point is one of the most original, enjoyable, and profound books I’ve ever read. It is a great work of art.” —JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.
On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews set sail for a promised land: not Jerusalem or New York, as many on board had dreamed, but Texas. This was the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten episode in US history in which ten thousand Jews fled the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire for the Gulf Coast.
In the wake of a dramatic split in the early Zionist movement, a group of rebels impatient for an alternative to Palestine formed a rival organization. Their motto: “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.” Led in their search for a temporary homeland by the renowned novelist Israel Zangwill and by Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, they scoured the Earth before reluctantly settling on Galveston. Zangwill feared the Jewish identity would be lost in the great American melting pot, but he saw no other hope.
In Melting Point, Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews in a highly inventive style. Constructed entirely of primary sources, with one flowing into the next, the book lets long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell their stories with a novelistic vividness and detail. We follow Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars and to London, New York, and Jerusalem as their lives intertwine with those of memorable figures of the twentieth century—Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Melting Point asks what it means to belong, what can be salvaged from the obscured past, and whether a promised land can ever live up to its promises.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cockerell's captivating debut recounts a largely forgotten plan to settle Russian Jews in Texas at the turn of the last century. Initially, Cockerell planned to write a memoir about her grandmother and great aunt, who raised seven children together in a giant Edwardian home in 1940s London. But research into Cockerell's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who moved the family to England from Kyiv at the start of WWI, revealed that he was a key figure in convincing Jews to escape early 20th-century pogroms in Russia by moving to Texas. Drawing from interviews with her surviving family members and a global archive of written sources, Cockerell pieces together first-person accounts narrating the history of 20th-century Zionism. She begins with Theodor Herzl's 1896 proposal for a Jewish homeland in Palestine before tracing the splintering of that movement, including Jochelmann's successful establishment of a significant Jewish presence in San Antonio. "Is this your golden America?" asks one recent arrival to the city. "Muddy streets, unpaved, with miserable little shacks... just like in Russia's shtetlech!" In Cockerell's hands, pre-WWI New York City and London brim with competing Yiddish theaters and raucous debates about cultural assimilation. While Jochelmann remains something of an enigma, Cockerell vividly conjures the world he helped create. Readers will be enthralled. Photos.
