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.
By 1906, however, he was convinced that nowhere could accommodate the more than 200,000 Jews expected to leave Russia that year. While many wanted to go to the US, he told an audience: “You could not forever go pouring emigrants into New York, or New York would burst.” By diverting them to the port of Galveston in Texas, they would be able to settle all over “the Great American West”. It was Jochelmann who took charge of the Russian end of operations.
Unfortunately, there are only passing references to him in the historical record and he left no written description. Cockerell’s first draft of this book offered a conventional account, with her “own narrative woven through primary sources”. But when she read it back, she began to feel “irritation at [her] own interventions”, which tended to “take the reader out of the story”. She therefore made the bold decision to let the people of the time speak for themselves, and to rely solely on extracts from articles, speeches, memoirs and letters.
Melting Point opens with a range of contemporary reactions to the regal Herzl and the clumsy and ill-kempt Zangwill, both major public figures in their day. It includes poignant eyewitness accounts of the terrible Kishinev pogrom of 1903; competing voices at a series of fractious Zionist conferences; Texans’ first impressions of the incoming Russian Jews and the immigrants’ first impression of Texas. One was initially thrilled by San Antonio as the long-imagined “golden land” but soon became disappointed by the streets “overgrown with thorny bushes” and the “miserable little Mexican shacks, constructed of boards, covered with rusted tin”.
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, of people confused and flailing about in response to immediate events without any sense of what we know now.
Zangwill pioneered the idea of the US as a “melting pot” in his play of that title, and Zionist history obviously touches on issues of identity, assimilation and the meaning of “home” that remain tragically relevant today. The second half of this book, which turns to Jochelmann’s children, reprises such themes in a minor key.
A son by his first marriage became a radical American playwright, while his two daughters shared a house in London. Five of their own children provided Cockerell with rich and evocative reminiscences.
Fanny and Sonia had contrasting skills and personalities but made such a great team that they signed their joint letters “FanSon”. They created a warm, chaotic and arty home for their families at the end of the road where I live in Willesden Green. Fanny emerges as a particularly engaging character, constantly losing children, getting into traffic accidents, using potatoes instead of flour to make a chocolate pudding or rescuing a Christmas pudding which had exploded all over the walls from a neglected pressure cooker.
Yet even this charmingly shambolic world was haunted by political divisions. Sonia had married a fellow Russian Jew deeply committed to Zionist causes. Fanny’s husband was an archetypal Englishman who attended Passover meals in a bowler hat. It was probably inevitable that Sonia and her family should move to Israel in the early 1950s and so split an intensely close-knit family along what Cockerell calls “two paths that have been inching further and further apart ever since”. Although now in his 80s, Michael – Fanny’s son and Cockerell’s father – still clearly feels a deep sense of loss. His words make a poignant end to an exceptionally vivid and compelling family history.
• Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
