When she started work on this fabulous book about her family, Rachel Cockerell was most intrigued by her grandmother Fanny and great aunt Sonia, who “raised [seven] children together in a giant, Edwardian north London house in the 1940s”. She envisaged only a few sentences about their father, David Jochelmann, who brought them over from Kyiv at the start of the first world war and lived in the same house until he died in 1941. But although the family remembered him only as a “businessman”, research soon revealed a fascinating backstory – a strange and largely forgotten project that saw about 10,000 Russian Jews set sail for Texas in the years between 1907 and 1914.
The Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl founded political Zionism with the publication of The Jewish State in 1896. The cause was mainly taken up in the Russian empire, where a series of pogroms convinced many Jews they no longer had a future there. But the Zionist movement was deeply divided about where they should go. Some held out for Palestine as the only possible Jewish homeland. Others desperately scoured the world, from Angola to Australia, for somewhere to establish some sort of colony or enclave, at least as a temporary staging post. Such “territorialists” were led by the celebrated British novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill.
