In “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,” Rachel Cockerell’s first nonfiction book, she sets out to rescue a historical footnote: a plan to create a Jewish state in Texas at the beginning of the 20th century. Her great-grandfather David Jochelman helped lead this effort, seen at the time as a temporary, last-resort refuge for persecuted Jews. As his partner in the plan, Israel Zangwill, said at the time, “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.”
In this genre-bending work, Ms. Cockerell made the radical decision to remove herself or any kind of narration from the bulk of the book, instead stitching together selections from contemporaneous newspaper articles, journals, and speeches.
On the eve of the U.S. publication of her book, Ms. Cockerell, who is based in London, spoke by video call with the Monitor’s Israel correspondent Dina Kraft about the book’s unusual structure and what she hopes readers might take from it. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why We Wrote This
It was not inevitable that Israel would become the site of a Jewish state. In the nascent Zionist movement of the early 20th century, other locations were considered. An author looks at the role her great-grandfather played in bringing Jews out of Eastern Europe to Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s.
In your earlier drafts of the book, you kept whittling your narration away. Why did you feel the need to get out of the way?
I realized that I was not a character in this story. I was not there at the First Zionist Congress [in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897]. I was not there when the first Jewish immigrants arrived in Galveston [in 1907]. I was not there after World War II at 22 Mapesbury Road, my family home in North London, when my grandmother and her sister were raising all their children. I wanted to take out this slightly irrelevant 21st-century narrator, and just put the reader directly back into the past, so they felt immersed in Vienna in 1898 or in Galveston in 1911 or in New York in 1925 or in London in 1948. I wanted it to feel more like a novel and more sort of intensely immersive, rather than just having someone to remind them that they were in the 21st century.
You’re a master of curation, of building suspense and character and plot without including your narrative voice. How did you choose these pearls?
It’s something George Saunders [who wrote “Lincoln in the Bardo”] talks about.
He talks about choosing your art form. So as I was reading all these long newspaper articles, out-of-print memoirs, diaries, and letters, I found I had strong opinions about which sentences to pull out because they struck me as funny or strange or seemed to have an accidental double meaning, or appeared to be foreshadowing something. It took three years of tinkering and rearranging these snippets endlessly until it felt like they clicked into place, that they sort of came alive with energy. These voices now seem to be in conversation with each other, even though they had been dead for 100 years.
Why do you like spending time in the past?
My favorite time period is probably the very beginning of the 20th century. The horror of the 20th century, World War I, World War II, was sort of looming over them. And yet these inhabitants of the beginning of the 1900s felt that they were at the dawn of a bright new century; the brightest, best new century that had ever been. Also, I love that time period, because people wrote in such a modern way. It’s not like writing from 50 years earlier. These people could quite easily exist in 2025.
Their sense of humor is so modern. You don’t feel the expanse of time that has elapsed, between then and now. And yet, it’s also very beautifully written and free of cliche, and every phrase is sort of spun in such a beautiful way. I was constantly taken aback, almost sort of gasping at these just delightful phrases that I would encounter.
When did you first get interested in your family story?
Around 2019, my Israeli relatives came over [to London] for my dad’s cousin Mimi’s 80th birthday party, and I was only sort of dimly aware of their existence before that. And that made me wonder: How are these people related to me? I didn’t even make the connection that they were my grandmother’s sister’s descendants. That would have been too much of a stretch for me. And then I read an obituary of my great-grandfather in The New York Times, and I thought: “Why does he have an obituary in The New York Times, which says that he was a household name across Jewish households in the Russian Empire?” Because my family had never talked about him, and if they had said anything about him, it was that he was too boring to even consider. And there was a dusty, gloomy portrait of him hanging in my family home. So that spark of interest [to learn more about him] became a [416-page] book.
What do you hope people will take from your book in a time when Zionism is being placed under the magnifying glass?
I hope that it will just very slightly destabilize people in these views, which seems so concrete. You know, everyone, no matter which side they’re on or what views they have, I hope that it will slightly pull the rug out from under their feet. I hope the reader is sort of changing their mind about things every page or every few paragraphs, or at least sort of seeing things in a new way. So much of the debate about Zionism now seems to be about Zionism post-1948. I think no matter how you feel about where we are today, we have a duty to be curious about how we got here and where this all started. And I think it started with Theodor Herzl [modern Zionism’s founder] writing his pamphlet “The Jewish State.”
