Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

Cockerell’s captivating debut recounts a largely forgotten plan to settle Russian Jews in Texas at the turn of the last century. Initially, Cockerell planned to write a memoir about her grandmother and great aunt, who raised seven children together in a giant Edwardian home in 1940s London. But research into Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who moved the family to England from Kyiv at the start of WWI, revealed that he was a key figure in convincing Jews to escape early 20th-century pogroms in Russia by moving to Texas. Drawing from interviews with her surviving family members and a global archive of written sources, Cockerell pieces together first-person accounts narrating the history of 20th-century Zionism. She begins with Theodor Herzl’s 1896 proposal for a Jewish homeland in Palestine before tracing the splintering of that movement, including Jochelmann’s successful establishment of a significant Jewish presence in San Antonio. “Is this your golden America?” asks one recent arrival to the city. “Muddy streets, unpaved, with miserable little shacks... just like in Russia’s shtetlech!” In Cockerell’s hands, pre-WWI New York City and London brim with competing Yiddish theaters and raucous debates about cultural assimilation. While Jochelmann remains something of an enigma, Cockerell vividly conjures the world he helped create. Readers will be enthralled. Photos. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co. (May)