Melting Point - by Rachel Cockerell (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Long-listed for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

A New York Times Most Anticipated Book

"Fabulous . . . One gets a thrilling sense of history unfolding in real time." --Matthew Reisz, The Guardian

This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.

On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews set sail for a promised land: not Jerusalem or New York, as many on board had dreamed, but Texas. This was the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten episode in US history in which ten thousand Jews fled the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire for the Gulf Coast.

In the wake of a dramatic split in the early Zionist movement, a group of rebels impatient for an alternative to Palestine formed a rival organization. Their motto: "If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy." Led in their search for a temporary homeland by the renowned novelist Israel Zangwill and by Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, they scoured the Earth before reluctantly settling on Galveston. Zangwill feared the Jewish identity would be lost in the great American melting pot, but he saw no other hope.

In Melting Point, Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews in a highly inventive style. Constructed entirely of primary sources, with one flowing into the next, the book lets long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell their stories with a novelistic vividness and detail. We follow Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars and to London, New York, and Jerusalem as their lives intertwine with those of memorable figures of the twentieth century--Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Melting Point asks what it means to belong, what can be salvaged from the obscured past, and whether a promised land can ever live up to its promises.

Review Quotes

"Miraculous" -ZADIE SMITH

"Dazzling... Chilling and exhilarating, like wading into the river of time...Collectively, these voices are coaxed by Cockerell into becoming some of recent literature's most compelling narrators... A revelation" --Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

"Melting Point teleports like a literary Tardis, shifting seamlessly between late 19th-century Mitteleuropa, the tree-lined boulevards of Galveston a decade later, the Lower East Side of New York, [and] wartime London . An ambitious and high-risk venture...yet Cockerell pulls it off with verve' --Adam LeBor, The Times (London)

"Spectacularly successful, a joy to be immersed in. Spellbinding." --SIMON SCHAMA
"A remarkable, gripping account. This is a work of history that reads like a novel . . . Bristles into vivid, bustling life." --ROBERT MACFARLANE

"[Cockerell] remains backstage, cutting and pasting, seeking the most vivid descriptions, restoring the grain of voices. The result is a book that sings with narrative energy . . . Melting Point is a deeply satisfying book, and a sorrowful one. Cockerell has pulled the threads of her family story together, restoring forgotten histories and measuring losses . . . Rachel Cockerell shows us that the creation of a Jewish homeland was never a foregone conclusion or a sure thing." --Alice Kaplan, The New York Review of Books

" The effect is electric, plunging readers into an intense, vivid, often contradictory set of observations, as if experiencing history as it unfolds, with all its glaring uncertainties . . . Rachel Cockerell realized that the voices she'd unearthed from archives, taken from newspapers, diaries, books and letters, arranged just so, spoke for themselves better than she ever could . . . What she had, she realized, was a transatlantic epic"--Casey Schwartz, The Washington Post
"Partly an immersive history of major events (early Zionism and the schism within its ranks); partly a nonfiction novel of ideas; partly a caper among fast-living bohemians; partly a family saga; and ultimately Cockerell's reclamation of her birthright." --Marc Tracy, The New York Times

"Fabulous . . . Cockerell has an unerring eye for selecting, editing and juxtaposing the most revealing quotations. So the result feels deeply immersive and dramatic. One gets a thrilling sense of history unfolding in real time." --Matthew Reisz, The Guardian

"Rachel Cockerell's riveting and formally inventive narrative offers nothing less than an alternative history of the twentieth century, and of one of its most enduringly consequential movements . . . ... The radical implications of Cockerell's narrative sneak up on you. But they are likely to linger long after the last page has been read." --D. D. Guttenplan, The Times Literary Supplement

"Astonishing . . . Melting Point plunges us directly into primary source material . . . Striking . . . A captivating exploration of identity and a search for belonging, a quest that reverberates into the present." --Alexander James, Financial Times

"Eclectic, fascinating . . . The reader is left to consider how no family's story can be disentangled from history's complex web." --Erica Wagner, The New Statesman

"Unforgettable . . . Nonfiction will be different as a result." --JONATHAN FREEDLAND
"Melting Point is an evocative, genre-bending history of an unexpected promised land." --ANNE APPLEBAUM

"With this, her dazzling debut, Cockerell proves herself to be a bright new light in the world of narrative nonfiction." --CANDICE MILLARD

"Cockerell made the ingenious decision to allow her source materials to tell this story . . . This multivocal narrative is entirely compelling, creating an extraordinary experience for the reader." --Bob Goldfarb, Jewish Book Council

"A new literary genre . . . The result is not only a robust history but a gripping story." --Gideon Sylvester, The Jerusalem Post

About the Author