Rachel Cockerell Presents a Virtual Jewish Book Council Author Talk on Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
Thursday, May 14 at 7pm on Zoom
Register to watch this program on Zoom at home: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ePznD_l8QF2rl3ne6r-nwg
Falmouth Jewish Congregation invites you to attend a free, virtual Jewish Book Council author talk (watch at home) on Thursday, May 14 at 7pm as part of its Jewish Book Council series. This author talk program features Rachel Cokerell presenting on her award-winning Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, one of the Washington Post’s Top 10 Books of the Year, a New Yorker Essential Read, and long-listed for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Cockerell’s is the penultimate JBC author talk of this year, followed on Thursday, June 11 at 7pm by a Zoom-based talk by Barry Joseph on Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend.
Cockerell’s dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of the plan to create a Jewish state in Texas, just one of several plans that spun off of Zionism’s focus on Palestine. It’s an utterly absorbing read and fascinating chapter of both our country’s and Jewish history.
What the critics are saying:
“Melting Point is one of the most original, enjoyable, and profound books I’ve ever read. It is a great work of art.” ―Jonathan Safran Foer
“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
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, which brought to the Gulf Coast ten thousand Jews fleeing the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire. It was a plan conceived of by Zionists impatient for an alternative to Palestine. 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.
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.