Zibby chats with author Rachel Cockerell about her dazzling, eclectic, genre-bending new book, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land. Blending family memoir with forgotten chapters of Jewish history, Rachel uncovers the extraordinary life of her great-grandfather, the early debates within Zionism, and the little-known Galveston Plan to resettle Jewish immigrants in Texas. She explains her innovative method of weaving together primary sources to create a vivid, novel-like narrative, and reflects on themes of assimilation, identity, and historical memory.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Melting Point, Family Memory, And The Search For A Promised Land. Congratulations. 

Rachel: Thank you so much, Zibby. 

Zibby: Thank you. Well, this book is so incredibly timely and informative and I wish everybody could read this and understand a lot of the history of things that people are talking about right now with such passion in the news and elsewhere.

Why don't you talk about the book and, uh, your unique method of writing it and all the rest. 

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So I started this book in 2019. I had read a few other Jewish family memoirs, um, like the Hair with the Amber Eyes by Edmund Deval. And I thought I knew, I, I knew vaguely that I had some Jewish ancestry.

I knew that my grandmother was Russian Jewish, but I had very, very limited knowledge about her and how and when she came to England. But I thought I wanted to write this sort of quite straightforward family memoir set in North London in the 1940s. My dad grew up in a house at 22 mapesbury road, um, with his siblings, his parents, his cousins and their parents, and also his very Russian grandmother and her sister. So it was this, it was really like a pocket of, uh, Russian Jewish life in North London. I mean, I'm sure that, you know, on their street, there were probably several other houses like that. But really I just wanted to write about post-war London and my dad's childhood, a sort of quite narrowed sort of domestic story.

And then I began to ask how and why My family came to England when they did, and I found out that, uh, the Jacques LeMans as, as they were called, arrived in London from the Russian Empire just as World War I broke out, so I thought I should maybe start the book with that. And I began researching my great-grandfather and that's when the book sort of took a turn.

I realized that my great-grandfather probably had probably the most dramatic life out of anyone in our family, and yet he has been completely forgotten. You know, my dad could tell me nothing about him, his mother, my grandmother never mentioned him. He was one of the first Zionists and then abandoned the Zionist movement.

There was a sort of split in Zionism in, you know, in the early 19 hundreds. It was, you know, in all the newspaper headlines at the time, Zionism splits and this sort of rival group had a motto, if we cannot get the holy Land, we can make another land holy. They thought we've got to find a temporary Jewish refuge somewhere on earth.

And they searched the whole world and the temporary Jewish refuge they found was Galveston, Texas. 

Zibby: And you write all about the Galveston plan and your great grandfather's involvement there, and I, I feel like you should give a little background because there were, as you point out in the book, a couple other places that they were very seriously considering and debating in this j well Jewish Congress with their Theodore Herzl and why they ended up picking.

Palestine versus any other place, and you know, you even have the headlines, you know, London, you know, the UK or whatever, not the UK obviously, Great Britain gives, uh, gives land away and all of this. So can you just give a little synopsis of how that decision was made? 

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So my book is called Melting Point and the subtitle is Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land.

And this search for a Promised Land has really been forgotten. I guess the only sort of alternative promised land that some people know about is the Uganda plan, as it was called, um, which was this slightly farfetched idea, very early in the days of modern Zionism of creating a Jewish homeland in East Africa.

Theore Herzl had approached the British government and said, we need somewhere for the Jews to gather, to sort of colonize and, uh, the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, father of the much more famous one Neville Chamberlain said, I have seen a land for you on my travels, Dr. Herzl, and that's Uganda English Rose's bloom profusely. It reminds me a lot of the Sussex downs and if you could be persuaded to, you know, shift your focus away from Palestine, then, you know, east Africa, this, this piece of land in East Africa is yours, if you want it. Herzl felt that he had to transfer this offer to the Jewish people, and that was it all went quite sort of catastrophically wrong.

So Uganda was the first sort of seriously considered alternative to Palestine. But then this, you know, this this rival movement, which was led by my great-grandfather and a writer, I'm sure we'll talk about Israel Zangwill a sort of novelist turned Zionist, turned anti-Zionist, sort of scoured the earth, and all these sort of created all these, all these plans in places like Angola and Australia, Canada, Mexico, Paraguay.

All these plans fell through quite quickly for one reason or another, you know. They were considering land in the middle of Australia and wondering, it seems too good to be true. Why don't people live there? And it's because it's, you know, intensely hostile to human life. Um, the Canadian government said a Jewish state in Canada is quite outta the question.

You know, there was. It was just doomed to failure from the beginning. But, you know, hindsight is 2020 and at the time the newspapers were saying, you know, it's quite likely that we'll see a party of Jews you know, form a colony in, in the middle of Australia. Uh, this time next year. We wish them the best of luck.

Zibby: Crazy. So when you were doing all the research and the way in which you present this material in the book is so original as well, talk a little bit about how you presented it because it's almost like documents you would read in history class in high school or something where you are excerpting the key points from a variety of sources and writing it almost in dialogue fashion.

So we're getting multiple viewpoints, almost like, yeah. Anyway, it's just super unique. Talk about telling the story this way and, and why you pivoted to this from how you had originally planned to write the book. 

Rachel: I love that you call it dialogue fashion. That's kind of, that's exactly what I wanted. I guess all nonfiction books, especially, you know, books about history have prime sources in them.

You'll have a sort of snippet from a, a newspaper or a letter or something, but then the author's voice will be in there as well, maybe as a character or more often as sort of glue gluing all these sources together and sort of smoothly transitioning the reader from one to the next or paraphrasing them.

I found that when I was reading history books, my favorite bits were the quotations, the bits where you are in the story with the person who was actually there rather than some 21st century middleman. So I, you know, I had this first draft which had all my interjections in it, and when I was sort of reading it back, I felt that my place in the story served no purpose.

My injections were a little bit inane. They felt a bit sort of phony almost, and I began to wonder whether I could just lead straight from one primary source or one snippet to the next. Almost as if these voices from the past were in conversation with each other. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Rachel: And was to tell their side of the story. And I guess the way I made it work was not to have, you know, three lines followed by three lines, followed by three lines to maybe have one line and then a few pages and then a paragraph and then four paragraphs so that you are almost like moving between these characters and letting, letting a different character sort of take you through the story.

And I hope it kind of gives it the feel of a novel more than the feel of a history book. 

Zibby: Yeah. I didn't mean to say it felt like a history book. I just meant I remember going through the primary documents, as you mentioned, to find those little gems, which are what you make up. You like to do all the work for us.

But no, it tells a story and then you include the actual words of the people in the moment as well. Not just, I met Thedo Herzl, but then like, here's the whole speech that he gave, or here's the something he wrote. So no, we're getting a 360 view of, of history as told by you, which is great. And then explain how you link all of that and then transition in your three part structure to all the different pieces of where you lived here and how this relates to your family and, and everything. 

Rachel: Yeah. So I was writing this or you know, putting together this book during the pandemic and this sort of giant unwieldy story was swirling around my head.

It was the Galveston plan, it was Hertz on the founding of Zionism. It was my dad growing up in North London in the forties and early fifties and then there's also a section in the book, um, set in the melting pot of New York in the twenties and thirties narrated by my grandmother's half brother's daughter.

So, and you know, you know, when I was trying to describe this book to people, and I still kind of find this, it doesn't sound like it all links together, but in my head it was like a huge corkboard with red string attached to everything. I guess the, you know, the, the thing that links this whole story is assimilation, is Jewish immigration, or I guess any, any immigrants who go to a new place and find that they lose the place they came from maybe in one generation, maybe in two or three generations, they try and cling onto certain part of their life or their sort of heritage and it does sort of maybe fall away whether you like it or not.

You know, I'm a product of the melting pot of London. My grandmother, you know, arrived here only speaking Russian and her head filled with Russian Jewish life and I, as much as I want to claim the Russian Jewish identity as my own, I don't think I can because it all, just within the course of two generations, it all sort of dissolved away.

You know, there's a play and there's a play in the book called The Melting Pot, written by Israel Zangwill in 1908. And it was, the Zangwill sort of coined this term. No one really used the phrase melting pot as a metaphor for American assimilation before that. And this play sort of took the nation by storm.

You know, everyone was talking about it. Theodore Roosevelt went to the opening night and was sort of, you know, led the standing ovation. And this play, the melting pot, is almost sort of propaganda for the idea of America as a melting pot. People from the old world arriving and casting off their old world ways and emerging from the melting pot as shiny new Americans. You know, this play is a slightly sappy sort of love story about two immigrants, becoming an American. And you know, some of the critics said, Kanza will really believe that this is the answer to the, you know, to the Jewish question. 

Zibby: Wow. Crazy.

Can you also. Just finish the explanation for people who might not know, and I think there are some people who are quite educated, who just are not knowledgeable of this area. Your great-grandfather led a whole group to Galveston, Texas. Why did Galveston, Texas not become Israel? 

Rachel: The original idea was to buy one of the southern states of America from the American government and turn it into a Jewish state. Very quickly this idea was shown to be unworkable. You know, the Americans said, absolutely not. You know, they, it, that was not gonna happen and so the sort of plan B was to bring as many Jewish refugees as possible to America, but not to New York, where this huge, overwhelming stream of immigrants had been arriving at, you know, the turn of the 20th century.

You know, New York was the greatest Jewish center in the world, and there were some longer established German Jews who looked down upon the Russian Jews of the Lower East Side and saw or in their view, the Lower East side was overflowing and that if this rate of immigration continued, antisemitism would spread like a menace across America.

So the idea of these German Jews was to divert the stream of Jewish immigrants away from New York to somewhere further down the east coast of America. And they chose Galveston partly because it had seven years before been destroyed by the greatest natural disaster in US history. And they thought that.

It was just, you know, it was slowly rebuilding and it was still just unattractive enough that the Jews wouldn't want to create a, you know, a ghetto in Galveston, a sort of new lower East side. So that's why Galveston was chosen, and also because it had railroad lines extending like the five fingers of a hand all across the sort of American interior.

So that, an immigrant arriving in Galveston could, get off the boat after a month long journey and get on a train that day to, you know, Kansas City or um, anywhere, you know, anywhere in the American Hinterland. 

Zibby: Wow. So of course, as we know, that did not work. They did end up where they ended up and Israel is where it is.

But now of course people are contesting that it has a right to that land. How does your research inform this hot topic today? Yeah, 

Rachel: I guess, you know, this book starts with the founding of Zionism and with Herzl, you know, Herzl writes in his diary in, you know, I think the late 1890s, you know, I have this, I have this idea, you know, I'm writing this pamphlet, the Jewish state of, you know, I have this idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland of Palestine.

But if nothing comes of it, at least I can turn this into a novel title, the Promised Land. Herzl really as far as I can understand, had no idea of this vast machine he was setting into motion. This machine that is still, the cogs are still turning today. You know, there's this phrase in the book that one of the characters said the unrest chain of events and you know, we think of I think, you know, when we talk about Zionism today and Israel today, I think most people are thinking about post 1948, but I think we almost have a duty to be curious, no matter how we feel about Israel, be curious about how this all started and the, how the events of a hundred years ago shape our, you know, shape 2025.

Zibby: Do you get frustrated when you hear things in the news that you know from a deep historical dive or not accurate? How do you handle that? 

Rachel: Yeah, I, I don't get frustrated, I guess, you know, I, I think when I, when before I started writing this book, I was quite ignorant about Jewish history and the history of Zionism.

But yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, it is just useful to, to go back to the start and I have I mean, it's, you know, I've had people on all sides of the spectrum say that they've sort of learned something from this book and I like the idea that it maybe just sort of destabilizes you a bit in your view to, to find out what actually happened and not be sort of, I hope that this book isn't really sort of biased or doesn't really have an agenda, that it's just about presenting the past as accurately and as vividly as possible.

And that maybe you go in with some very firm view, very sort of neat principle, you know, tied tied in a bow to how you feel about things and maybe this, this book, you know, my aim is to sort of pull the rug out from under the reader's feet a little bit. 

Zibby: Has there ever been, and I should, I could have obviously Googled this, but I didn't.

Has there ever been movies that depict this period of time in the way that you present it with all the sources and the different points of view? 'cause it, it is a. And not just stopping there obviously, maybe they didn't cover your grandparents, ancestors. But has there been a mainstream depiction of this backstory?

Rachel: I guess not. I mean, I now, I guess, see the world through melting points, tinted glasses. I sort of. He traces this story everywhere. I didn't see the brutalist, but I think that has sort of elements of, you know, Jewish immigration and Steven Spielberg made a film about his I think his parents who were Jewish immigrants to Kansas maybe.

And I guess, yeah, the story of Jewish immigration to America in the 20th century is one that has, has just traces and echoes in a lot of the media that we sort of consume today. 

Zibby: But I want, I want there to be a film that goes back even further to really put us in the room. I mean, the way now having seen exactly who's saying what and even how it's being reported, it just feels so cinematic to me.

So anyway, I'm gonna keep searching or maybe it's just you're doing and then that's great. So 

Rachel: I was, I was very inspired by certain films, which were nothing to do with, uh, Russian Jews going to Texas. There's a film about the moon landing, which is, in theory, a documentary because it's formed entirely of archival footage and audio from the ground in, you know, ground control.

But also, you know, on the rocket itself where the astronauts were sort of filming things and recording, you know, uh, transmissions back to earth. And that documentary could have easily had sort of talking heads and a sort of, you know, voiceover artist saying, and soon they were about to land on the moon.

But it has none of that. It's just the archive stuff and as a result, it, you know, it feels like you're there. It feels like you're watching a feature film rather than a documentary. And I guess, that idea of sort of blurring the boundaries between genres was something that I was very inspired by from documentaries without voiceovers.

Zibby: Hmm. So interesting. Have you been surprised by the success of the book? 

Rachel: I have, when I, you know, I've spent five years telling people that I'm, I've been writing a book formed entirely of primary sources, about a little known and long forgotten movement to bring 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas.

And by the time I finished saying that, you know, their eyes have glazed over their sort of backing off slowly, it does feel very niche, both in terms of the form and the content. So I guess the fact that it has sort of reached people and, and made an impact has been a very happy surprise for me.

Zibby: And how do you, how do you process all the information about your own family and your own identity that you found through the process? 

Rachel: I think, I guess I was feeling, I went through my life feeling, I was gonna say isolated in terms of just generationally isolated, you know, I I feel like my family has such a short term collective memory.

We don't really talk about anyone further back than my grandmother and even, you know, even my grandmother, I didn't know a huge amount about her before I started about her before I started this book. And so I guess it has, spending this time in the early 19 hundreds with my great-grandfather and with his contemporaries.

Yeah it did, it did sort of. To connect me to my own lineage in a way, which yeah, is something that, uh, I guess I'll have the rest of my life. 

Zibby: Amazing. And where do you go from here? How do you start another giant project? 

Rachel: For so long, I was completely at a loss and thought I would never have an uh, idea again, and that the juice to Texas was my only, the only thing I could ever write about, and then I realized that this form of telling a story entirely through primary sources can actually be applied to any story as long as you have such a vast mountain of archive material that you think you're never gonna get through at all, that you think you are gonna drown in it, that it would take several lifetimes to get through.

Because what that means is that if you spend long enough sort of combing through it all, you can find the exact right beat for, the exact right sentence or paragraph you know, for every moment in the story, there are no sort of holes or gaps where you have to jump in as the narrator.

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Rachel: So I think I, I, I guess I would like to show that this strange form of writing history can be applied to other topics as well. 

Zibby: Oh, I love that. Annabelle Gurwitch, who contributed to the anthology I published and edited called on being Jewish now her essay was about being a Jew from Galveston, Texas, by the way.

Rachel: Wow. Oh, I've gotta check that out. 

Zibby: So I should put you two in touch. You should do an event. She's also hilarious. Hilarious by the way, so. 

Rachel: Oh, amazing. 

Zibby: Um, yeah. Anyway, well, Rachel, I learned a lot. I found this so fascinating and I'm so glad that you and I met at a book event at the 14th Street Y in New York City, and you were like, I have this book and it's doing quite well.

So anyway thank you for introducing yourself and thank you for all of your time putting together a very complicated history and making it incredibly easy to consume and something that I feel is of utmost important in the conver u utmost importance in the conversation today. So thanks. 

Rachel: Thank you so much, Zibby.