Episode 28: Rachel Cockerell
On The Zionist Dream That Sailed to Galveston
Rachel Cockerell’s Five Books:
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains by Ariana Neumann
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell
The Five Books is a podcast that celebrates the role of books in Jewish culture. Through author interviews, we delve into Jewish identity and discover each author’s favorite novels. Join us every week for new Jewish book recommendations! Some of our episodes have included conversations with Rabbi Sharon Brous (Senior Rabbi at IKAR, and author of The Amen Effect), Yael Van Der Wouden (author of The Safekeep), and Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews.)
Sign up for our newsletter to get new episode reminders, authors’ five book picks, and more delivered straight to your inbox.
Find us on Instagram @fivebookspod or on Facebook at The Five Books Podcast.
For feedback or author recommendations please email us at team@fivebookspod.org
For transcripts and more find us online at www.fivebookspod.org
The Five Books has the advisory and promotional support of the Jewish Book Council. Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying and celebrating Jewish literature and supporting authors and readers. Stay up to date on the latest in Jewish literature! https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/events/celebrate
The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.
Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Editorial and website support by Sarah Waring
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamed, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. The journey marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the leadup to World War I.
In a highly inventive style, Cockerell captures history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews into a vivid account. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York, and Jerusalem―as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.
Rachel Cockerell was born and raised in London, the sixth of seven children. She did her BA at the Courtauld Institute and her MA at City University. Melting Point is her first nonfiction book. Her research has taken her to Texas, Ohio, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.
In our conversation, we explore assimilation — both as a theoretical concept and as a deeply personal experience. We also discuss the power of reading history through primary sources, and the ways we often misunderstand our own significance.
Transcript:
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, and today I'll be talking with Rachel Cockerell about her book, Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, a family memoir about the long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.
Rachel Cockerell:
Everyone will go into a book about early Zionism and about a search for Jewish homeland with certain views about things. And maybe sort of unshakable views. And I hope that this book sort of shakes your views a bit, no matter what you think going into it.
Rachel Cockerell is a writer and historian born and raised in London. Her first book, Melting Point, is an experimental history about her family's search for a promised land. It centers around the Galveston Movement, a long-forgotten project that brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas pre-World War I. They were led by her great-grandfather.
My great-grandparents were part of this wave of immigrants. My great-grandfather was sent to be a shochet, providing kosher meat to the expanding Jewish community in Galveston, and my grandfather was born there.
The Melting Point was long listed for the Bailey Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. In this episode, we explore assimilation, both as a theoretical concept and as a deeply personal experience.
Rachel Cockerell:
I'm so acutely aware of everything that I've lost. It's painful. The language and the culture and the food and the history and the poems and everything that my grandmother had when she was growing up that I definitely didn't have.
We also discuss the power of reading history through primary sources and the ways we often misunderstand our own significance.
Rachel Cockerell:
I felt like this generation, me, my siblings, my family, were sort of the present generation and all the other generations were just a lead up to the present. I guess we all sort of feel like that about history to some extent, that how sad that historical figures are sort of stuck in the past, and they didn't know that the past was just almost like a dress rehearsal for the present.
All that and more coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Rachel. I'm really excited to talk to you about this book today. We're here to talk about your book Melting Point, which is three sections.
They're all told through primary sources and structured as narrative, which is very hard to envision without seeing it, and even harder to understand that it doesn't just work, it's brilliant. The first section tells the story of the origins of modern political Zionism and the role of your great-grandfather. The second section focuses on your grandmother's half-brother, who was quite a well-known writer and dramatist. And then the third section is about your grandmother and her sister and their families who raised their children together in one house before one sister moved to Israel.
That's right.
Yeah. So I thought that I understood the history of the origins of Zionism, and reading your book was, like, actually mind-blowing. I hope that when courses on this are taught, that people will use your book as a primary source.
And as I've told you, I also felt an attachment right away to your exploration of the Galveston Plan, which was when there was a concerted effort to direct Jewish immigration to Galveston from Russia, probably right around the turn of the century. And my great-grandparents came to Galveston from Russia around then, which is all to say that I was riveted by your book. And it shines a light on a piece of history, which I think has huge ramifications and is really forgotten.
So thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you so much.
You write in your author's note that you set out to write a family memoir, and then you discovered more about your great-grandfather's life, and that radically shifted your vision for the project. So can you tell us a little bit about your original vision, and then how that evolves and came to be this project in three sections?
Rachel Cockerell:
Yeah, I really just wanted to write quite a straightforward, normal, quite sort of narrowly focused book about my dad's upbringing in North London during and after World War II. He grew up in a house with his siblings, his cousins, his parents, his cousin's parents, his grandmother and his great aunt, and all the adults were recent immigrants from the Russian Empire and all spoke Russian, apart from my dad's father, my grandfather, Grandpa Hugh, who was this slightly sort of reserved Englishman who had married into a family of Russian Jewish immigrants. Even in a house in London, he was sort of the odd man out.
And my dad had, you know, I had grown up hearing stories about 22 Mapesbury Road from my dad and stories about his mother, Granny Fanny, who I never met. And I really just wanted to capture this post-war North London house through the memories of my dad and his siblings and cousins. So that was the plan.
And then I thought I should just at least begin the book with maybe a sentence or two about how my family got to England from the Russian Empire when they did, which was just as World War I broke out. I started reading a bit about my great-grandfather. And everyone in my family had almost sort of said, there's not much there, don't really bother with him. He was a businessman. This phrase that my dad and one of his cousins used was, he was in stocks and shares, which is very vague. I mean, I didn't really know what it meant. I don't think they knew what it meant. But the first thing I found when I started reading about him was his obituary in the New York Times, which said “Dr. Jochelmann's name was a household word for Jews across the Russian Empire.” And I thought, why is this, you know, like obscure businessman, why is his name a household word? Or, you know, was, a hundred or more years ago. And then I discovered that he had been one of the first Zionists and had left the Zionist movement in quite a dramatic fashion. He and others had stormed out of the Zionist Congress to form a rival group, which had the motto, if we cannot get the holy land, we can make another land holy.
So, you know, he had lived quite a dramatic life and his life had been sort of intertwined with history and with the founding of Zionism. So, you know, I realized that he would have to take up more than just a sentence at the beginning of the book.
So can you give us an overview of how you eventually structured those three sections?
Rachel Cockerell:
Yeah, I mean, I started this book in 2019 and I think it probably took me about three years, maybe a bit longer. And for a while this whole story was sort of swirling around my head and when I try to explain it to people that it's sort of about Zionism and the melting pot of America and my family in North London and, you know, New York in the 1920s, it seems to not really all make sense together. And then I, gradually this sort of swirling mass began to organize itself into three parts.
So the first part is about Zionism and this breakaway from Zionism, the Galveston Project. And then I guess this book flips from being more of a history to more of a family memoir. The second section takes place in the melting pot of New York and it centers around my grandmother's half-brother, Emjo Basshe, who was a playwright, and his daughter, who he named Emjo Basshe II. And then this third section is in, finally, you know, North London in the 1940s.
The book you sent out to write.
Exactly. Got there in the end.
Book One: a Jewish Book from Childhood — The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.
Rachel Cockerell:
The Hare with Amber Eyes is, I guess, you know, there has been this sort of trend in the past, sort of, I would say 10, 15 years of the Jewish family memoir. There have always been Jewish family memoirs, but I feel like there have been more of them in the past 10 or 15 years. And as far as I can tell, The Hare with Amber Eyes was one of the first of those.
It's by a British author called Edmund de Waal, and he is a ceramicist, and he writes this book which is, feels sort of beautifully sort of artistic and sort of beautifully honed about his family who lived in Vienna. And you know, it's about art and it's Edmund de Waal sort of imagining these scenes with his family. One of my teachers mentioned it at school and I thought, oh, you know, I was, I was reading mostly novels at that point and I thought, oh, I don't want to read some non-fiction history book, you know, set in Vienna 100 years ago. It sounded sort of quite dusty and dull. But then when I started it, it just transported me to a different place and time. And I think that sort of planted the seed for the idea that maybe one day I could write a Jewish family memoir.
What did you know about your Jewish roots growing up?
Rachel Cockerell:
Almost nothing. My grandmother's maiden name was Jochelmann. I didn't really know how it was spelt. I didn't know anything about her early life. I didn't feel particularly Jewish. You know, I think my family has melted into the melting pot of London.
My grandmother, you know, was born a Russian Jew and came to England when she was a child. And according to some of my family members, she decided to become more English than the English. So, you know, she married an Englishman. She didn't teach her children Russian. She didn't cook Russian food or Jewish food. She celebrated Passover with her family, but that was something my dad didn't pass on to his children. So just within the course of two generations, this Russian Jewish life sort of fell away. And my Jewish identity was always just so peripheral in my vision.
And then when you read this book, did it feel familiar to you in some way?
Maybe a little bit, and maybe that's just projecting. But looking back, I guess it definitely planted the seed, and it was almost like a tap on the shoulder. Like, don't forget that this is your heritage too.
And there's also just the heartbreaking contrast in the book between the permanence suggested by their wealth and their homes, and how quickly everything was taken from them. And firstly the family, it was obviously fabulously wealthy and cultured and assimilated. I was wondering how you relate to those themes of assimilation, that cultural elitism, wealth.
Rachel Cockerell:
Mm, yeah. I mean, assimilation was what I was thinking about every day while I was writing this book. I guess I hadn't realized that I was a product of assimilation until I started this. And, you know, I realized that it wasn't just a sort of small domestic story about my family. I think the themes of assimilation are kind of universal for any immigrant or any second generation or third or fourth generation immigrant, that you go somewhere and the place you came from starts to dissolve away. You maybe try and cling onto it, but, you know, there's a limit to how much you can cling onto it. I guess I now just, I see the melting pot everywhere, you know, people think of it as the melting pot of New York, but I think anywhere you go, you start to melt into the melting pot, whether you like it or not.
Yeah, there was one spot in here. It's Israel Zangwill. What really struck me was the foresight they had. They anticipated assimilation, which hadn't really been possible for Jews in so many societies. They didn't have the ability to fully assimilate because they were kept separate and all of the laws kept them separate. And he says, “all the Jews on the branch line are going nowhere. The Jewish people has been preserved almost exclusively by its religion, as a tortoise is protected by its shell.” And he goes on, “America is the land of refuge, but it is also the melting pot. No people in history has ever been able to live unmelted in the bosom of a bigger people, except when safeguarded by a separate religion.” I thought it was so interesting that he sort of saw it all coming.
Rachel Cockerell:
Yeah, I mean, Zangwill is this figure who I, you know, he's no relative of mine and he is, he wrote many fairly patchy novels, in my opinion. And yet he almost insisted on becoming the main character of this story. He was my great-grandfather's closest friend and led the Galveston Project, and eventually persuaded my great-grandfather to move to London when he did.
I was captivated by him because in public he said the great American West is the new home for the Russian Jews. And then in private he would say things like, America is the euthanasia of the Jews. If I had my way, not a single Russian Jew would enter America. And then he wrote this play, The Melting Pot, which was really propaganda for the idea of assimilation. And reviewers said, can Zangwill really believe that melting into the melting pot is the solution?
What do you make of that difference between public and private?
Rachel Cockerell:
I think that I believe the private version of what he said. Writing this book, I kind of felt like I knew him by the end. And I thought like, Zangwill, you're, come on, you can't really believe that the great American West is the best Jewish refuge possible. But then again, you know, maybe he was sort of changing his mind about it all the time. That's another thing in this book. I kind of wanted the reader to be changing their mind every few pages. It's this question of a Jewish refuge being turned over and over and over and never being able to reach a sort of neat and perfect and convenient answer. So that sense of sort of instability was something that was quite important to me.
Did you always know that you wanted to write?
Rachel Cockerell:
I think I did as a child and maybe as a sort of young teenager. And then it went away for a while, for maybe a decade. And then it came back again, I think. And I realized that it had always been there. And I've always, I think the sign of any, like, creative practice is when you have very strong opinions about things. I've always found reading certain paragraphs, either of my own or of other people's, I'm sort of editing it as I go and restructuring it and thinking, oh, you know, just cut that word and change that around. I wish I had that with music, for example, of, you know, writing a song and having strong opinions about how to make it better. But I only have those strong opinions for prose. And I think maybe that's a sort of a sign that you've hit on the thing that comes naturally to you.
You set out to write the story of your grandparents. And that's the third section of the book. What was it about that idea of that home that you were so interested in exploring?
Rachel Cockerell:
It's a large, slightly sort of crumbling, shambolic house in North London. And I go there every year for Christmas with my family. My uncle lives there now. It's a house with, I think, four stories. And he's just one man living in one or two rooms. It doesn't feel haunted, but you can almost feel that it used to be filled with people, and now it's not. There's something, there are ghosts, or there's something going on in that house.
And yeah, I guess I was also interested in the dynamic between my grandmother and my grandfather. They were total opposites. My grandmother was quite similar to me and my sisters, very messy, very chaotic, late for everything, like always losing all her possessions. You know, people have read this book and said like, oh, this explains a lot. She has handed down her own personality to you.
And my grandfather, you know, very reserved, very quiet Englishman. And everyone around them said, you know, they're so ill matched, and yet they were happy together for almost their entire adult lives. So I guess I wanted these two figures to be sort of characters almost. They almost felt like characters in a novel for me because I never met my grandmother and my grandfather died when I was one or two. So they were, yeah, I just wanted to sort of capture them.
It did feel like a storybook of just all the cousins totally living together, intermingled, their whole lives and worlds intertwined. Felt like an English storybook.
Thank you.
Book Two: a Jewish Book from Adulthood — When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann.
Rachel Cockerell:
This book is When Time Stopped and it's another Jewish family memoir. It's beautifully written and really sort of compulsively readable. Ariana Neumann grew up in Venezuela and she always knew that her father had a slight foreign accent and he seemed sort of out of place somehow in Venezuela, but she never knew more than that.
And then when he died, that's when she discovered her father's past. He was born in Prague and during World War II escaped as a young boy to Berlin. So you know, really the last place you would think of a Jewish refugee escaping to.
And her father was always fixing clocks and fixing watches. So this element of time and the sort of cogs and wheels of time is very present in the book. It also sort of feels like a thriller at certain points. You're sort of reading it with bated breath. I read that while I was writing Melting Point and I thought, oh, this can be done. I hadn't realized that writing a Jewish, you know, sort of nonfiction memoir could be sort of electric like that.
I read something that she wrote for the Arts Desk. She said, “if in gazing at those who come before us, we don't peer carefully behind the facades and beneath the silences, we risk leaving secrets shrouded and essential stories untold. The timing doesn't always work as it should. Sometimes it is left to subsequent generations to uncover the important stories. But that makes the work of uncovering them no less crucial.” That spoke so exactly to what you both have done, just uncovering stories that would otherwise not be with us at all.
Yeah, yeah, completely.
I'm thinking about how you stumbled on to your great grandfather's story. And once you found it and brought it to other family members, was it something that they then said, like, oh, we kind of knew about that a little bit? Or had they really just not known it at all?
Rachel Cockerell:
The only person who knew about it was my uncle Dave, who's named after my great grandfather, David Jochelmann. And Dave, Dave, who lives at 22 Mapesley Road, and who was the only living sibling of my dad, who chose not to be interviewed for the book, which I completely understood and respected. But then when he read it, he said, oh yes, I knew all about the Galveston Plan.
He was the closest with his father, my grandfather, Hugh. And I guess Hugh had told him about, you know, his father-in-law's early work. So that was quite funny that, you know, I had gone on this journey of discovery and Dave had, you know, been in Mapesley Road all along and, you know, knew all this stuff. But everyone else in my family, I was, you know, it's quite strange to tell your own relatives about something which they should have been telling you about, but it just sort of got lost in the collective memory of my family. Yeah.
Did it impact any of your family members in ways that are obvious to you now?
Rachel Cockerell:
I don't know. I think they were quite proud and, you know, quite pleased to have this sort of almost memorial of our family. My family was called the Jochelmanns and because it was two daughters, both of whom, you know, married and had children with their husband's names, this family, the Jochelmanns, almost sort of no longer exists. So, yeah, I guess to be able to capture that, this family who will just sort of be forgotten forever, I think my family were quite happy about that.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — Orbital by Samantha Harvey.
Rachel Cockerell:
It's a novel about six astronauts on the International Space Station, and really it's 150 pages, maybe less, and you just feel like you're there with them. You're there looking down on Earth as it slowly turns, and as this space station sort of climbs up and down the surface of the Earth, and you sort of go on these different trajectories and see the Earth from different angles and cross, you know, cross all these different pathways over the Earth's surface. Sort of like When Time Stopped, it expanded my sense of what a book can do. It's one of those books where you have to sort of put it down and stare at the wall every few minutes.
Well, I guess the prose kind of circles and spirals, and it's more concerned with, like, sensation than plot. And it made me think of how Melting Point also departs from the conventional structure using these primary sources, and it invites the reader into a more associative experience. What appeals to you about that kind of reading experience?
Rachel Cockerell:
I guess knowing that books don't have to just be in a straight line and they don't have to follow all these sort of strict frameworks that we have imposed upon genre and plot. I guess I wanted to create something which feels meandering while you're in it, and then you look back and you see how it all fits together. I guess genre bending as well was something that I very much embraced. There's a writer called Catherine Scanlon who says that we should be more mischievous with genre, which I really love.
You also mentioned the six astronauts who form this micro community, and they're totally interdependent. Again, it made me think of your grandmother and her sister. Why do you think they chose to live that way?
Rachel Cockerell:
I don't know. There are so many questions for people who have died. I imagine that it was probably quite convenient. It was post-World War II, and their father had just died, and they had this giant house big enough for as many children as they had. And at first, they were living sort of all mixed up within the house, and then they decided to live separately and sort of be on separate floors. But they were also very close. My grandmother Fanny and her sister Sonia, they were apparently like Siamese twins. There was only a year or two separating them in age. When they had been growing up in Ukraine, they shared a bed, and there are all these amazing old photos of them, almost looking like twins. They would sign off their letters Fanson, you know, for Fanny and Sonia as if they were one person. So maybe they just felt that these Siamese twins needed to sort of be as close as possible to each other.
Yeah, they also complimented each other in so many ways. One was doing the cooking and more responsible, and one was kind of more fun and taking the kids on adventures.
Yeah, so my grandmother was the fun one, and also slightly sort of away with the fairies, and found it difficult to function as a conventional 1940s housewife. She was quite a sort of wild spirit. I guess Sonia was also a wild spirit in her own way, but together they made one person.
You write also in your author's note about visiting your great aunt's family in Israel. So can you tell us a little bit about how she ended up in Israel and that side of the family?
Rachel Cockerell:
These two sisters who were more or less Siamese twins, in 1951, my grandmother's sister Sonia left for Israel with her husband who was a Zionist. Sonia was not political really. You know, her daughter said to me she was never really a Zionist, she only went for the weather and spent much of her life in Israel talking about England, talking about back home, eating cornflakes for breakfast. But you know, she raised her three children there. So that branch of my family think of themselves as Israeli now. And you know, they have had children and grandchildren. And when I go to visit them, you know, they're all speaking Hebrew. I've had Passover and Hanukkah with them. And you know, I feel, wow, a small decision taken in 1951 has caused these two branches of a family to sort of drift further and further apart.
Book Four: the Book You're Reading Now — Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.
Rachel Cockerell:
It's quite an uncanny book because it's about a global pandemic, but Emily St. John Mandel wrote it before the global pandemic. I think she wanted to write a story about what it would be like to live on earth in the modern age without electricity and without all the modern things that we're so used to. There are a few survivors of this pandemic and it's just sort of normal people. And obviously, it's almost like humanity has forgotten how to do all these things. I found it completely captivating. Have you read it?
I haven't read it.
Oh, it's, yeah, it's very, very beautiful. And, yeah, I guess I love the uncanny in books. I think it's like a very underrated quality for a book to have.
The uncanny.
The uncanny, yeah, things that just make you feel like you're being watched almost.
Book Five: the author's latest book — Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land by Rachel Cockerell.
I want to go back to your use of only primary sources. I think it's so interesting you were talking about wanting to be a writer and working with prose, and yet you didn't add any of your own prose into the story. But it's so tightly edited, and the way that it reads, it reads like an incredibly compelling narrative. So I just want to hear more about that decision. It feels like an immersive chorus-like narrative. So tell me about what it was like to assemble that.
Rachel Cockerell:
It was a very messy and ugly process. I had so many terrible drafts before I got to what I ended up with. And the first draft was written conventionally with my own voice, woven through primary sources. And then I realized that I was not a character in this story. I was not at the first Zionist Congress. I was not there when the first Russian Jewish immigrants arrived in Galveston in 1907. I was not in North London with my grandmother and her sister and their children. And I wondered if I took my voice out, whether the reader could be led through this story by the people who were actually there, and sort of jump from one person to another, and jump from one person's head to another person's head. It felt kind of like a tightrope walk, putting all these sources together so that they were in conversation with each other, and that one snippet from a diary or a letter or a newspaper article almost seemed to pick up where the last one left off, and sort of argue with it or bristle with it in some way, like these voices were coming alive.
And for a long time there were sort of holes in this where I felt like I had fallen off the tightrope, where I thought, can't I just fill in the gaps here? But I made this rule that I couldn't, and eventually I managed to find all those jigsaw puzzle pieces and create something which I hope sort of flows and you're sort of led through this story. Not by me, but by the eyewitnesses.
Yeah, you absolutely are. And I am actually surprised that it only took you three years to write. It felt like, you know, some of the quotes are really short, some of them are longer. They really did all feel in conversation with each other and just figuring out how to assemble that felt like it must have been quite a project.
Rachel Cockerell:
It was a lot of restructuring and just thinking about it at all times when I was walking down the street thinking, I wonder if I put that bit there? And also feeling so overwhelmed by the amount of source material I had and the amount that I still hadn't found and the number of archives that I had to look through. You know, it's like Easter egg hunting for the sentences in my own book.
I had to find everything. Sometimes I would be in an archive and have like a trolley of boxes and I would have to go through all the boxes. And I felt like, oh, the sentences of my book are in these boxes, like needles in a haystack and I just have to find them.
As I said, I thought that I had read a lot about Herzl and the origins of Zionism. And this really showed me that I didn't know anything. There was something about viewing it as it all unfolded, as you said, like an immediate bystander. What did you take away from that section?
Rachel Cockerell:
I also went into this book fairly ignorant about modern Zionism. If the name Theodor Herzl was familiar to me at all, I kind of thought of him as some great political thinker, sort of somber old man. And then I learnt quite quickly that he was a young, charismatic journalist living in Vienna, very much assimilated Jewish, writing these sort of witty columns about his family. Meanwhile, writing his diary about how trivial he felt his journalistic work was, and perhaps he had found a movement to bring the Jews back to their ancient homeland of Palestine, but if it didn't work out, at least he could turn it into a novel.
So, you know, Herzl, when he founded modern Zionism, as far as I can tell, had no idea of this vast machine that he was setting into motion. And I guess, you know, we think of history as dates and as these sort of figures from black and white photographs, almost like two-dimensional cutouts. And I wanted to sort of humanise Herzl and show him, from 360 degrees, all his egotism, his wit, his charm, his magnetism, his sort of self-regard, all of it. And showed that, you know, this political movement, the cogs of which are still turning today, was founded by a young journalist who didn't know what he was getting himself in for.
In a similar way, I think the thing that most surprised me, and maybe just speaks to my own ignorance, is the urgency that was obvious to everyone at the time, especially after the pogrom in Kishnev in 1903, that more was coming, more, worse was coming. And they just needed to get the Jews out of Russia. And that was the beginning of the Galveston Plan, was just how do you transport this community out. So that was really surprising to me. I'm curious what surprised you most, or what were some startling discoveries that you made as you were doing all this?
Rachel Cockerell:
It's exactly that, you know, it's these sentences that you would find from, you know, 120 years ago, where they're almost, you know, to use this word again, sort of uncannily predicting the future. I think Israel Zangwill says at one point, “who knows what the 20th century has in store for the Jewish people? Are we destined to sort of stand by and wring our hands?”
And it's, you know, it's painful to read because you want to sort of shake them by the shoulders and it's all these predictions about what might happen and then actions which you think, is that really the best that you can do? So yeah, I suppose that hindsight is 20-20, but seeing how clearly some people were able to map out what might happen to the Jewish people in the 20th century was something that I wanted to capture in the book.
Can you tell us a little more about Israel Zangwill? He loomed so large in the book, it's clear that he was a huge figure at the time and is really just totally forgotten. So if you could tell us more about him and why you think that is.
Rachel Cockerell:
Yeah, he was hugely famous. He was sort of one of the first celebrities of the 20th century. He was a novelist and a playwright. He wrote a novel called The Children of the Ghetto. You know, wherever he went, particularly in London and New York, you know, he would have swarms of admirers wanting to sort of shake his hand. And, you know, people saying “Oh, Mr. Zangwill, I adored your book. You know, I bought seven copies. Can I have your autograph?” That sort of thing.
He was fairly shambolic. The press was very rude about him, said he was the worst dressed man in London and the ugliest man in the world. He had a face to scare horses with. One reporter met him just as he arrived in New York. He stepped off the boat, and this reporter said that he was so ugly and so badly dressed that he made you want to dive to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. And yet he had this great wit and this sort of encyclopedic mind and could sort of talk about any branch of art and science and turn it all into a big joke.
And he wrote this play called The Melting Pot, which was, Zangwill really coined that term as a metaphor for assimilation, particularly in New York. You know, this is 1908, and before that, people didn't use the phrase melting pot in that way. And we use that phrase today, and it's really Zangwill's greatest legacy. His novels have been forgotten, and the play itself, which was a play about two immigrants in New York, falling in love and sort of casting off their old world ways and emerging from the melting pot as shiny new Americans, is quite a bad play. But the title lives on, and the sort of the idea behind it lives on.
And Roosevelt comes to see it, right?
Rachel Cockerell:
Roosevelt comes to see it on the opening night, leads the standing ovation and shouts, it's a great play, Mr. Zangwill. And that line is sort of used in all the advertisements from then on. Zangwill dedicates the book form of the play to Roosevelt. You know, Roosevelt had said things like, immigrants arriving from the old world should revere only one flag, the American flag, no other flag should even come second. So, you know, this play was almost slightly sort of pandering to Roosevelt.
And why do you think Zangwill has been so completely forgotten?
Rachel Cockerell:
I think his work is very much a product of its time. You know, there are certain writers who have a timeless quality about them. Zangwill was often called the Dickens of the Ghetto. And I think Dickens' work is more timeless and can sort of traverse the decades and the centuries in a way that Zangwill's work, you know, was very readable to an 1890s, 1900s audience, but is less readable to someone like me in 2025. But I still, you know, the book is called Melting Point, and people call it Melting Pot all the time. And I quite like that because I feel like me and Zangwill are sort of sharing something. He's the main character in my book. So despite his not wonderful writing, I do want people to remember him.
And tell us more about your great grandfather and the role that he played.
Rachel Cockerell:
He was living in the Russian Empire. As I said, he and Zangwill split away from the Zionist movement and formed this rival group with the terrible name of the Jewish Territorial Organization, which is not very catchy. They shortened it not to the JTO, but to the ITO. So it's just like, just bad all around. But they searched for an alternative to Palestine. You know, they thought we've got to find some temporary Jewish refuge somewhere.
And eventually, they landed on Galveston, Texas. And my great grandfather's job in those seven years was to persuade Russian Jews planning to go to New York, to go to Galveston instead. And he actually visited Galveston himself. And you know, the Texan newspapers write about Dr. Jochelmann, you know, arriving in Texas to see how the Galveston movement is getting on. I think he had been planning to emigrate to America himself, and then sort of, you know, ended up in London almost by chance. So you know, we think…
Wasn’t it Zangwill who convinced him?
Rachel Cockerell:
He went to London to sort of wrap up the Galveston movement and fell ill while he was there and stayed with Zangwill. And Zangwill said to him, don't return to the Russian Empire. Bring your wife and children over here. Your daughters are destined to become English. And he was right, you know, at least about one of the daughters, my grandmother, that she was destined to become English. You know, I was reading these letters in an archive, you know, maybe in 2022, under these sort of strip lights, still with my COVID mask on. And that was sort of the final missing piece to this book, was Zangwill, this sort of historical figure, directly affecting my family and affecting my life and really shaping the person I am.
And what do you make of that tension between assimilation and cultural retention? We've talked about it a little.
Rachel Cockerell:
It is just bittersweet. And I mean, for me, I'm so acutely aware of everything that I've lost. And it's painful to — the language and the culture and the food and the history and the poems and everything that my grandmother had when she was growing up, that I definitely didn't have.
I guess it's sort of, I feel a bit impoverished in that way. So for me, the melting pot is something to lament in a way. And yet, it's who I am. I'm a Londoner and you can't lament your own, the person you are.
In resurfacing all of these layered voices, there are pogrom survivors from the Kishineya pogrom, Zionist activists. What did you feel like was the hidden emotional truth or message that you most wanted readers to hear?
Rachel Cockerell:
I think really I just wanted to make the reader less sure of themselves. To be, you know, everyone will go into a book about early Zionism and about a search for Jewish homeland with certain views about things and maybe very sort of strongly held views, sort of unshakable views. And I hope that this book sort of shakes your views a bit, no matter what you think going into it.
You know, I think we do have this duty to be curious about the past, no matter how we feel about it. And I hope, yeah, this just makes the reader keep changing their mind and then changing it back again and then changing it one more time.
One thing that struck me, which we had a conversation on the podcast with Dara Horn, and it was something that she talked about also, but seeing it in the primary sources, how much post-World War II, there's this idea that the world agreed to give the Jews Israel because of this like sentimentality of, we feel bad, what happened to you. But actually, it was just a huge refugee crisis, and nobody really wanted to take in more refugees, and so this was a way of deferring the refugee crisis.
Mm, yeah. I mean, there's a chapter in the book about 1948, and I hope that the reader will get a sense of these debates which just keep on churning around and around and just hitting dead ends at every turn, and finding an answer which is bad and then finding another answer which is worse, and each problem causes a spiral of problems.
Which we are still unraveling, maybe not so well.
Yeah.
Yeah. And how has this book changed you and how you relate to your Jewish identity?
Rachel Cockerell:
I guess it's, I've always felt a bit isolated from my family history, from my past, from previous generations. You know, I felt like this generation, me, my siblings, my family, were sort of, you know, the present generation and all the other generations were just a lead up to, you know, to the present. I guess we all sort of feel like that about history to some extent, that how sad that historical figures are sort of stuck in the past, and they didn't know that the past was just almost like a dress rehearsal for the present.
So writing this and seeing that my great-grandfather had a far more dramatic life than any of his descendants will ever have, and the way his life intertwined with world history, and his encounters with all these historical figures. There's a scene, for example, of Theodor Herzl's funeral, and my great-grandfather just appears for a glimpse as one of the mourners. And I guess every family is sort of intertwined with history, but this just made me see all those intertwinings, see all those strings attaching people and historical figures more clearly.
Well, I'm so grateful that you dug a little deeper and gave us all this gift. It's such a beautiful and compelling book. I really think everyone should know this history and know these characters, and it's wonderful to know your family.
So thank you so much for joining us and for being here today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Rachel Cockerell talking about her book Melting Point. You can find a link to the book and all the others Rachel discussed in our show notes.
If you'd like an email reminder to keep you up to date with new episodes plus links to all the books we discussed directly in your inbox, you can sign up in the Show Notes or on our website, fivebookspod.org. If you enjoyed our show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family and rate and review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Rating and reviewing really does help new listeners find our show.
You can email us feedback or author recommendations at team at fivebookspod.org. You can find us on Instagram at Five Books Pod or on Facebook, the Five Books Podcast. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen.
Our producer is Odelia Rubin. Editorial and website support from Sarah Waring. Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
Art by Dena Friedman. Thanks especially to the Jewish Book Council.
