When author Rachel Cockerell started a nonfiction book project about her late Jewish grandmother in the UK, the last thing she suspected her research would turn up was a long-forgotten great-grandfather’s involvement in an obscure early 20th-century initiative to bring refugee Jews to Galveston, Texas.
Cockerell leaned into the unexpected twist, producing her daring new book, “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land.” Released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this spring, it has received multiple critical accolades, including from the Sunday Times and The New York Times. In an unconventional approach, the narrative is told not through an authorial voice but in the words and interspersed stories of the people themselves.
“I think it dawned on me that I was not a character in the book,” Cockerell said in a phone interview with The Times of Israel. “I was not there when the first Galveston immigrants arrived in Texas. I was not there in my family house [in London] after World War II … I began to wonder what my voice was doing in the story.”
Here’s how she tells the story instead: Through excerpts of primary sources and, in some cases, interview transcripts, along with contemporaneous newspaper accounts. Some quotes are one sentence long, some personal accounts extend for pages. Chapter 15 includes a headline from the June 8, 1907, Washington Times: “Colony of Hebrews Sailing for Texas.” “Nearly all were Russian Jews,” reported the B’nai B’rith Messenger, “and their homes ranged from the southern boundaries of the empire to the dreary frozen wastes of Siberia.”
Cockerell said she found inspiration for her approach from George Saunders’s American Civil War novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which is told in part through the perspective of “ghosts in a graveyard,” and “showed me genre is more blurry and fluid than we think it is. You can make a book into whatever you want it to be.”
The voices of the book include the author’s Russian Jewish great-grandfather David Jochelman, who in the early 20th century was a key member of a project called the Galveston Movement. In operation from 1907 to 1914, it was a collaboration between Jewish financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff and British Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill. Breaking with the Zionist movement, it aimed to find a new home for Eastern European Jews menaced by antisemitic violence — and it intentionally sought a destination that was neither Ottoman Palestine nor New York City.
“Lucky for me, [Jochelman] had a nice Googleable name,” Cockerell said. “His name was always mentioned in the same sentence as the word ‘Galveston’ … It was a forgotten project that brought 10,000 refugees to Texas.”
The sweep of history is present in this book. It begins in the early 20th century, with Theodor Herzl and the Zionist movement seeking to find an overseas home for endangered European Jewry. And it ends in the 1950s, when one branch of Cockerell’s family decided to immigrate to the newly independent State of Israel.
Early 20th-century news accounts quoted in the book chronicle the pogroms that motivated Zionists to encourage Jewish emigration. By the mid-20th century, the global media was documenting the birth of Israel. Some accounts celebrated a Jewish homeland, including for Holocaust survivors; others lamented the fate of 750,000 displaced Palestinian Arabs.
For the book, Cockerell conducted archival research and conducted interviews in multiple parts of the US — including Galveston, where she spoke with the late Rabbi Jimmy Kessler about the Galveston Movement.
Kessler was “lovely and jovial and … full of stories, jokes and laughter,” she said, recalling a meeting with the rabbi and his wife near the beach, amid bright sunlight and crashing waves. “We talked about the melting pot and what it means to be American Jewish.”
Take note of that phrase, “the melting pot.” Today, a well-known description of the immigrant experience in the US, it was coined by the aforementioned playwright Israel Zangwill. In fact, it was the title of a play he wrote, its premiere in 1908 part of the book’s narrative, with president Theodore Roosevelt in attendance, congratulating the playwright.
“It’s the first time the phrase ‘the melting pot’ was used as a metaphor for the project of the United States of America,” Cockerell said, “immigrants arriving in America and assimilating, emerging as shiny new Americans.”
The play centers on two Russian immigrants to the US — a Jewish man, David, and a Christian woman, Vera — who fall in love and realize their pasts are fatefully intertwined. Vera’s father was a czarist official who played a role in the deaths of David’s family in a real-life tragedy — the Kishinev pogrom. Nevertheless, David and Vera return to each other, choosing to subsume their previous identities so they can focus on their new life as Americans.
“Some people wondered whether Zangwill could have possibly believed in his own play, that assimilation was the answer to the Jewish question,” Cockerell said. “In private, Zangwill had said that America is the euthanasia of the Jews.”
Yet Zangwill remained committed to the Galveston Movement even as it ran into challenges from US immigration officials over whether or not some of the immigrants were qualified to enter. The movement was finally shelved in 1914, the same year as the start of World War I, allegedly due to the length of the trans-Atlantic voyage to Texas.
In the book, Zangwill is quoted advising his ailing assistant Jochelman to relocate to England: “You have plenty of working and thinking yet to do for the larger world.”
The book subsequently follows the trajectories of various members of Cockerell’s family, as the setting changes from Galveston to New York, then from New York to England in the wake of WWII. In war-ravaged England, two branches of the family would unexpectedly reunite.
As it turned out, Jochelman had a first wife before he married Cockerell’s great-grandmother. Through this first marriage, Jochelman had a son who went by the name Emjo Basshe and was an experimental playwright in New York. “Emjo” is a portmanteau of his birth name, Emmanuel Jochelman.
Emjo was a playwright in New York alongside literary luminaries John Dos Passos and Michael Gold, on a project meant to bring avant-garde theater to the public. (The New York section of the narrative incorporates quotes from prominent individuals of the period, from Ernest Hemingway to Dorothy Day.) Emjo and his wife, a Christian Southern belle named Doris Troutman, lived a bohemian lifestyle in Lower Manhattan while raising their daughter, Jo. Cockerell met and interviewed Jo in Canada.
“She was a joy to speak with,” Cockerell said. “As soon as I picked up the phone, I knew she was one of the pieces of the book that was missing. Her memories of the 1930s in New York were sharper than my memories from yesterday.”
Jo’s sparkling recollections pepper the book, including about growing up in a diverse, multilingual, multicultural New York environment: “All my mother’s and father’s friends were in the Village. Most of them were writers, artists. We had friends who were puppeteers. It was the best childhood a kid could have because nobody was normal — there were no businessmen.”
“She talked about FDR’s fireside chats and how people felt at the time in New York,” Cockerell said, “knowing that war clouds were gathering over Europe, having an ominous sense something was about to happen.”
Meanwhile, Jochelman had started a new family in London, where he and his second wife had two daughters, Fanny and Sonia. As a young adult, Fanny published a novel before becoming a wife and having four children. She was Cockerell’s grandmother, although Fanny died before the future author was born.
After WWII, two sets of Jochelman’s descendants would unexpectedly reconnect. Jo reached out to her relatives in London, who invited her to stay with them. Jo recalled a hubbub of welcoming, if disorganized, family life in London, and shared these memories with Cockerell.
As the book depicts, the family house was often a mess, Fanny was trouble behind the steering wheel, and she sometimes lost possessions — and, occasionally, one of her four children. Things got so hectic that Fanny’s family and her sister Sonia’s family ultimately decided to continue sharing the same house, but with each family living on a separate floor.
Although Fanny died before Cockerell was born, her life had a poignancy to the author.
“I saw so much of myself in her, and so much of her in myself,” Cockerell said.
As for the project that was initially about Fanny before becoming something completely unforeseen?
“I wanted to make this book feel more like a novel than a history book — completely immersive,” Cockerell said. “I hope to prove this format of interweaving primary sources is not just for books about Russian Jews going to Texas.”
Read more on The Times of Israel
