Rachel Cockerell, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
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[0:44]Rachel Cockrell is the author of Melting Point, Family Memory and the Search for a Promised
[0:49]Land.
[0:50]Rachel is a writer and historian, born and raised in London.
[0:54]Her first book, Melting Point, is an experimental history about her family's search for
[0:58]a Promised Land.
[0:59]My centers around the Galveston Movement, a long-forgotten project that brought 10,000
[1:04]Russian Jews to Texas before World War I.
[1:08]They were led by her great-grandfather.
[1:09]Five years of research took her to Ohio, Michigan, Texas, New York, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem.
[1:15]Melting Point has been praised by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the New Yorker,
[1:19]which called it magnificent, like waiting into the river of time.
[1:22]Rachel has spoken about her work on CNN, NBC, the BBC, and a TEDx.
[1:27]Welcome, Rachel.
[1:28]Thank you so much for coming on Totally Book to talk about Melting Point, Family Memory,
[1:33]and the Search for a Promised Land.
[1:35]Congratulations.
[1:36]Thank you so much, Zibi.
[1:38]Thank you.
[1:39]Well, this book is so incredibly timely and informative, and I wish everybody could read
[1:45]this and understand a lot of the history of things that people are talking about right
[1:49]now with such passion in the news and elsewhere.
[1:53]Why don't you talk about the book and your unique method of writing it and all the rest?
[2:01]Yeah, sure.
[2:02]So I started this book in 2019.
[2:05]I had read a few other Jewish family memoirs, like The Hair with the Amorized by Edmund
[2:10]Deval, and I thought, I knew vaguely that I had some Jewish ancestry, and knew that my
[2:16]grandmother was Russian Jewish, but I had very limited knowledge about her and how and
[2:22]when she came to England.
[2:24]But I thought I wanted to write this sort of quite straight-forward family memoir set in North
[2:28]London in the 1940s.
[2:30]My dad grew up in a house, 22 Mapesbury Road, with his siblings, his parents, his cousins,
[2:38]and their parents, and also his very Russian grandmother and her sister.
[2:43]So it was really like a pocket of Russian Jewish life in North London.
[2:47]I'm sure that, on their street, there were probably several other houses like that,
[2:53]but really I just wanted to write about post-war London and my dad's childhood, a sort
[2:58]of quite narrow, sort of domestic story.
[3:01]And then I began to ask how and why my family came to England when they did, and I found
[3:06]out that the Jockelmans, as they were called, arrived in London from the Russian Empire
[3:11]just as World War I broke out.
[3:14]So I thought I should maybe start the book with that, and I began researching my great
[3:18]grandfather.
[3:20]And that's when the book took a turn.
[3:22]I realized that my great grandfather had probably the most dramatic life out of anyone
[3:27]in our family, and yet he has been completely forgotten.
[3:31]My dad could tell me nothing about him, his mother, my grandmother, never, never mentioned
[3:35]him.
[3:36]He was one of the first scientists, and then abandoned the Zionist movement.
[3:40]There was sort of split in Zionism in the early 1900s, in all the newspaper headlines
[3:46]at the time, Zionism splits.
[3:48]And this sort of rival group had a motto, if we cannot get the holy land, we can make
[3:53]another land holy.
[3:55]They thought we've got to find a temporary Jewish refuge somewhere on earth.
[3:59]And they searched the whole world, and the temporary Jewish refuge they found was Galveston,
[4:04]Texas.
[4:05]And you write all about the Galveston plan, and your great grandfather's involvement
[4:10]there.
[4:11]And I feel like you should give a little background, because they were, as you point out
[4:15]in the book, a couple other places that they were very seriously considering and debating
[4:19]in this Jewish Congress with their Theodore Herzl, and why they ended up picking Palestine
[4:26]versus any other place.
[4:28]And you even have the headlines, you know, the UK or whatever, it's not the UK obviously.
[4:33]No, the Great Britain gives, gives land away and all of this.
[4:37]So can you just give a little synopsis of how that decision was made?
[4:44]Yeah, sure.
[4:45]So my book is called Melting Point, and the subtitle is Family Memory and the Search for
[4:50]a Promised Land.
[4:51]And this search for a Promised Land has really been forgotten, I guess the only sort of alternative
[4:57]promised land that some people know about is the Uganda plan, as it was called, which
[5:02]was this slightly sort of far-fetched idea, very early in the days of modern Zionism,
[5:08]of creating a Jewish homeland in East Africa, Theodore Herzl had approached the British
[5:12]government and said, we need some way for the Jews to gather, to sort of colonize.
[5:18]And the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, father of the much more famous Neville Chamberlain,
[5:24]said, I have seen a land for you on my travels, Dr Herzl, and that's Uganda.
[5:29]This roses bloom profusely, it reminds me a lot of the Sussex Downs, and if you could
[5:33]be persuaded to shift your focus away from Palestine, then, you know, this piece of land
[5:40]in East Africa is yours if you want it.
[5:42]Herzl felt that he had to transfer this offer to the Jewish people, and that was, it
[5:49]was all went quite sort of catastrophically wrong.
[5:51]So Uganda was the first sort of seriously considered alternative to Palestine.
[5:56]But then this, you know, this rival movement, which was led by my great-grandfather and
[6:01]a writer, I'm sure we'll talk about Israel's goodwill, a sort of novelist, turned Zionist,
[6:06]turned anti-Zionist, sort of scoured the earth, and all these sort of created all these
[6:11]all these plans in places like Angola and Australia, Canada, Mexico, Paraguay, all these
[6:19]plans fell through quite quickly for one reason or another, you know, they were considering
[6:23]land in the middle of Australia and wondering, you know, it seems too good to be true.
[6:27]Why don't people live there?
[6:28]And it's because it's, you know, intensely hostile to human life, you know, the Canadian
[6:33]government said a Jewish state in Canada is quite out of the question, you know, there was,
[6:38]it was just sort of doomed to failure from the beginning.
[6:41]But, you know, hindsight is 2020, and at the time the newspapers were saying, you know,
[6:45]it's quite likely that we'll see a party of Jews, you know, former colony in the middle
[6:50]of Australia this time next year.
[6:52]We wish them the best of luck.
[6:54]Crazy.
[6:55]So when you were doing all the research, and the way in which you present this material
[7:01]in the book is so original as well, talk a little bit about how you presented it because
[7:05]it's almost like documents you would read in history, class, and high school or something
[7:10]where you are accepting the key points from a variety of sources and writing it almost
[7:16]in dialogue fashion.
[7:17]And so we're getting multiple viewpoints and was like, yeah, anyway, it's just super
[7:23]unique.
[7:24]Talk about telling the story this way and why you pivoted to this from how you had originally
[7:29]planned to write the book.
[7:31]I love that you call it dialogue fashion.
[7:33]That's kind of, that's exactly what I wanted.
[7:35]I guess all, you know, nonfiction books, especially, you know, books about history have
[7:40]prime resources in them.
[7:42]You'll have a sort of snippet from a newspaper or a letter or something.
[7:46]But then that author's voice will be in there as well.
[7:48]Maybe as a character or more often as sort of gluing all these sources together and sort
[7:53]of smoothly transitioning the reader from one to the next or paraphrasing them.
[7:57]And I found that when I was reading history books, my favorite bits were the quotations,
[8:01]the bits where you're in the story with the person who was actually there rather than
[8:05]some 21st century middleman.
[8:08]So I, you know, I had this first draft which had all my interjections in it.
[8:12]And when I was sort of reading it back, I felt that my place in the story served no purpose.
[8:18]My interjections were a little bit in name.
[8:21]They felt a bit sort of phony almost.
[8:23]And I began to wonder whether I could just lead straight from one primary source or one
[8:28]snippet from to the next, almost as if these voices from the past were in conversation
[8:33]with each other.
[8:34]I must not be willing to tell their side of the story.
[8:37]And I guess the way I made it work was not to, not to have, you know, three lines followed
[8:41]by three lines followed by three lines to maybe have one line and then a few pages
[8:46]and then a paragraph and then four paragraphs so that you're almost like moving between
[8:52]these characters and letting, letting a different character sort of take you through
[8:55]the story.
[8:56]And I hope it kind of gives it a, the feel of a novel more than the feel of a history
[9:00]book.
[9:01]Yeah, I didn't mean to say it felt like a history book.
[9:04]I just meant I remember going through the primary documents as you mentioned to find those
[9:08]little gems, which are what you make up, you like do all the work for us.
[9:12]But no, it tells a story and then you include the actual words of the people in the moment
[9:18]as well.
[9:19]Not just I met Theodore Herzl, but then like here's the whole speech that he gave or here's
[9:22]something he wrote.
[9:24]So no, we're getting a 360 view of history as told by you, which is great.
[9:29]And then explain how you link all of that and then transition in your three part structure
[9:35]to all the different pieces of where you lived here and how this relates to your family
[9:40]and everything.
[9:41]Yeah.
[9:42]So I was writing this or, you know, putting together this book during the pandemic.
[9:47]And this sort of giant unwieldy story was swirling around my head.
[9:51]It was the Galveston clan.
[9:53]It was Herzl, the founding of Zionism.
[9:55]It was my dad growing up in North London in the 40s and early 50s.
[10:00]And then there's also a section in the book set
[10:03]in the melting pot of New York in the 20s and 30s
[10:07]narrated by my grandmother's half-brother's daughter.
[10:12]So, and you know, I guess, you know,
[10:14]when I was trying to describe this book to people
[10:16]and I still kind of find this,
[10:18]it doesn't sound like it all links together,
[10:19]but in my head it was like a huge corkboard
[10:22]with red string attached to everything.
[10:24]I guess that, you know, the thing that links
[10:27]this whole story is a simulation, you know,
[10:30]is Jewish immigration or I guess any immigrants
[10:33]who go to a new place and find that they lose
[10:36]the place they came from, maybe in one generation,
[10:39]maybe in two or three generations,
[10:41]they try and cling on to certain parts of their life
[10:43]or their sort of heritage
[10:45]and it does sort of maybe fall away
[10:48]whether you like it or not.
[10:49]You know, I am a product of the melting pot of London.
[10:52]My grandmother, you know, arrived here only speaking Russian
[10:55]and I had filled with Russian Jewish life
[10:58]and I as much as I want to claim the Russian Jewish identity
[11:03]as my own, I don't think I can
[11:05]because it all just within the course of two generations,
[11:08]it all sort of dissolved away.
[11:10]You know, there's a play and there's a play
[11:12]in the book called The Melting Pot written by Israel Zangwill
[11:16]in 1908 and it was the Zangwill sort of coined this term,
[11:19]no one really used the phrase melting pot
[11:21]as a metaphor for American assimilation before that.
[11:25]And this place sort of took the nation by storm.
[11:27]You know, everyone was talking about it.
[11:29]Theodore Roosevelt went to the opening night
[11:32]and was sort of, you know, led the standing ovation.
[11:35]And this play The Melting Pot is almost sort of propaganda
[11:38]for the idea of America as a melting pot.
[11:40]People from the old world arriving and casting off
[11:45]their old world ways and emerging from The Melting Pot
[11:48]as shiny new Americans.
[11:50]You know, this play is a slightly sappy sort of love story
[11:53]about two immigrants, you know, becoming an American.
[11:56]And, you know, some of the critics said,
[11:58]Can Zangwill really believe that this is the answer
[12:01]to the, you know, to do it Jewish question.
[12:04]Oh, crazy.
[12:05]Can you also just finish the explanation
[12:09]for people who might not know?
[12:10]And I think there are some people who are quite educated
[12:13]who just are not knowledgeable of this area.
[12:16]Your great grandfather led a whole group to Galveston, Texas.
[12:20]Why did Galveston, Texas not become Israel?
[12:23]The original idea was to buy one of the sudden states
[12:28]of America from the American government
[12:30]and turn it into a Jewish state.
[12:32]Very quickly, this idea was shown to be unworkable.
[12:36]You know, the Americans said,
[12:38]absolutely not, you know, that was not going to happen.
[12:41]And so the sort of plan B was to bring as many Jewish refugees
[12:46]as possible to America, but not to New York
[12:49]where this huge overwhelming stream of immigrants
[12:52]had been arriving at, you know,
[12:54]the turn of the 20th century, you know,
[12:56]New York was the greatest Jewish center in the world.
[12:58]And there were some longer established German Jews
[13:01]who looked down upon the Russian Jews of the Lower East Side
[13:05]and saw that the low, in their view,
[13:08]the Lower East Side was overflowing
[13:10]and that if this rate of immigration continued,
[13:13]antisemitism would spread like a menace across America.
[13:17]So the idea of these German Jews was to divert
[13:20]the stream of Jewish immigrants away from New York
[13:23]to somewhere further down the East Coast of America.
[13:26]And they chose Galveston partly because it had,
[13:29]you know, seven years before being destroyed
[13:31]by the greatest natural disaster in the US history.
[13:34]And they thought that it was just, you know,
[13:36]slowly rebuilding and it was still just unattractive enough
[13:41]that the Jews wouldn't want to create, you know,
[13:44]a ghetto in Galveston, a sort of new Lower East Side.
[13:47]So that's why Galveston was chosen
[13:49]and also because it had railroad lines extending
[13:52]like the five fingers of a hand,
[13:54]all across the sort of American interior
[13:56]so that an immigrant arriving in Galveston could, you know,
[14:00]get off the boat after, you know,
[14:03]month-long journey and get on a train that day
[14:05]to, you know, Kansas City or, you know,
[14:08]anywhere in the American Hintland.
[14:12]Well, so of course, as we know, that did not work,
[14:16]they did end up where they ended up
[14:18]in Israel is where it is.
[14:20]But now, of course, people are contesting
[14:23]that it has a right to that land.
[14:25]How does your research inform this hot topic today?
[14:29]Yeah, I guess, you know, this book starts
[14:32]with the founding of Zionism and with Herzl,
[14:35]you know, Herzl writes in his diary.
[14:37]And, you know, I think that late 1890s, you know,
[14:40]have this idea, you know, I'm writing this pamphlet,
[14:43]the Jewish state of, you know,
[14:45]have this idea of the Jews returning
[14:47]to their ancient home land of Palestine.
[14:49]But if nothing comes of it,
[14:50]at least I can turn this into a novel title,
[14:53]The Promised Land, that's all really,
[14:56]as far as I can understand,
[14:58]it had no idea of this vast machine he was setting
[15:01]into motion, this machine that is still,
[15:04]the cogs are still turning today.
[15:05]You know, there's this phrase in the book
[15:07]that one of the characters said,
[15:08]the unresting chain of events.
[15:11]And, you know, we think of, I think, you know,
[15:14]when we talk about Zionism today and Israel today,
[15:16]I think most people are thinking about post-1948,
[15:19]but I think we almost have a duty to be curious,
[15:22]no matter how we feel about Israel,
[15:25]be curious about how this all started
[15:27]and how the events of 100 years ago shape,
[15:29]are, you know, shape 2025.
[15:32]Do you get frustrated when you hear things in the news
[15:35]that you know from a deep historical dive
[15:38]or not accurate?
[15:39]How do you handle that?
[15:41]Yeah, I don't get frustrated.
[15:43]I guess, you know, I think when I went
[15:46]before I started writing this book,
[15:47]I was quite ignorant about Jewish history
[15:50]and the history of Zionism.
[15:52]But yeah, I mean, I guess,
[15:53]yeah, it is just useful to go back to the start.
[15:57]And I have, I mean, it's, you know,
[15:58]I've had people on all sides of the spectrum say
[16:01]that they've sort of learned something from this book.
[16:03]And I like the idea that it maybe just sort of destabilizes
[16:08]you a bit in your view to find out what actually happened
[16:10]and not be sort of, I hope that this book isn't really
[16:13]sort of biased or doesn't really have an agenda
[16:16]that it's just about presenting the past as accurately
[16:19]and as vividly as possible.
[16:20]And that maybe you go in with some very firm view,
[16:23]very sort of neat principle, you know, tied in a bow,
[16:27]how you feel about things.
[16:29]And maybe this book, you know,
[16:31]my aim is to sort of pull the rug out
[16:33]from under the readers' feet a little bit.
[16:35]Has there ever been, and I should,
[16:37]I could have obviously Googled this,
[16:39]but I didn't, has there ever been movies
[16:41]that depict this period of time in the way
[16:44]that you present it with all the sources
[16:46]and the different points of view
[16:48]because it is a, and not just stopping there,
[16:50]obviously, that, you know, maybe they didn't cover
[16:52]your grandparents, you know, ancestors,
[16:55]but has there been like a mainstream depiction
[16:59]of this backstory?
[17:01]I guess not.
[17:02]I mean, you know, I now, I guess see the world
[17:05]through melting point tinted glasses.
[17:07]I think he traces of this story everywhere, you know.
[17:12]I didn't see the brutalist,
[17:13]but I think that has sort of elements of, you know,
[17:15]Jewish immigration and Steven Spielberg made a film
[17:20]about his, I think his parents
[17:22]who were Jewish immigrants took Kansas maybe.
[17:25]And I guess the other story of Jewish immigration
[17:27]to America in the 20th century is one that has,
[17:31]has just traces and echoes in a lot of the media
[17:34]that we sort of consume today.
[17:36]But I want, I want there to be a film
[17:37]that goes back even further to really put us in the room.
[17:41]I mean, the way now having seen exactly who's saying what
[17:45]and even how it's being reported,
[17:47]it just feels so cinematic to me.
[17:49]So anyway, I'm gonna keep searching
[17:51]or maybe it's just you're doing and then that's great.
[17:53]So, I was, I was very inspired by certain films,
[17:57]which were nothing to do with Russian Jews going to Texas.
[18:01]There's a film about the moon landing,
[18:04]which is in theory, it's a documentary
[18:06]because it's formed entirely of archival footage and audio
[18:11]from the ground in ground control,
[18:14]but also on the rocket itself
[18:16]where the astronauts were sort of filming things
[18:18]and recording transmissions back to earth.
[18:23]And that documentary could have easily had sort of
[18:26]talking heads and a sort of voiceover artist saying
[18:29]and soon they were about to land on the moon.
[18:32]But it has none of that.
[18:33]It's just the archive stuff.
[18:34]And as a result, it feels like you're there.
[18:37]It feels like you're watching a feature film
[18:39]rather than a documentary.
[18:41]And I guess that idea of sort of blurring the boundaries
[18:44]between genres was something that I was very inspired
[18:48]by from documentaries without voiceovers.
[18:52]So interesting.
[18:53]Have you been surprised by the success of the book?
[18:56]I have, when I spent five years telling people
[19:00]that I've been writing a book,
[19:03]formed entirely of primary sources
[19:05]about a little known and long forgotten movement
[19:08]to bring 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas.
[19:11]And by the time I finished saying that,
[19:12]their eyes have glazed over,
[19:14]they're sort of backing off slowly.
[19:16]It does feel very niche, both in terms of the form
[19:20]and the content.
[19:21]So I guess the fact that it has sort of reached people
[19:24]and made an impact has been a very, very happy surprise for me.
[19:30]And how do you process all the information
[19:34]about your own family and your own identity
[19:36]that you found through the process?
[19:38]I think I guess I was feeling,
[19:40]I went through my life feeling.
[19:42]I was gonna say isolated in terms of
[19:44]just in generationally isolated.
[19:47]I feel like my family has such a short-term collective memory.
[19:53]We don't really talk about anyone further back
[19:55]than my grandmother.
[19:57]And even my grandmother.
[20:00]know a huge amount of her before I started about her before I started this book. And so I guess it
[20:05]has, you know, spending, spending this time in the early 1900s with my great grandfather
[20:12]and with his contemporaries. Yeah, it's sort of to connect me to my own lineage in a way which
[20:19]yeah, it's something that I guess I'll have the rest of my life. Amazing. And where do you go from
[20:24]how do you start another giant project? So long I was completely at a loss and thought I would
[20:30]never have an idea again and that the juice of Texas was, you know, my only, the only day I could
[20:36]ever write about. And then I realized that this form of telling a story entirely through primary
[20:42]sources can actually be applied to any story as long as you have such a vast mountain of
[20:49]archive material that you think you're never going to get through at all that you think you're
[20:52]going to drown in it that it would take several lifetimes to get through. Because what that means
[20:57]is that if you spend long enough sort of combing through at all, you can find the exact right
[21:03]sort of beat for, you know, the exact right sentence or paragraph, you know, for every moment in
[21:08]the story. There are no sort of holes or gaps where you have to jump in as the narrator. So I think
[21:15]I guess I would like to show that this strange form of writing history can be applied to other
[21:20]topics as well. I love that. Annabelle Gerwig, who contributed to the anthology I published and
[21:26]edited called on being Jewish now. Her essay was about being a Jew from Galveston, Texas, by the way.
[21:31]Wow. Oh, yeah. So I should put you to in touch. You should do an event. She's also
[21:36]hilarious by the way. So made now. Yeah. Anyway. Well, Rachel, I learned a lot. I found this
[21:43]so fascinating and I'm so glad that you and I met at a book event at the 14th Street Y in New York
[21:49]City and you were like, I have this book. It's doing quite well. So anyway, thank you for introducing
[21:54]yourself. And thank you for all of your time putting together a very complicated history and making
[21:58]it incredibly easy to consume and something that I feel is of utmost important in the
[22:04]conversation today. So thanks. Thank you so much, Libby. Thank you. Thank you for listening to
[22:11]totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show,
[22:16]tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word.
[22:22]Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.