Melting Point — an émigré Jewish family on a quest for a home
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Setting out to write a family memoir, Rachel Cockerell stumbled upon the life of her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. The man who brought the family to America from Kyiv at the outbreak of the first world war initially seemed like a “boring” bit player — but then she discovered that he had an astonishing hidden past.
Jochelmann had been a pivotal figure in the attempt to create “a provisional Palestine” in Texas. In what became known as the “Galveston Plan”, 10,000 Russian-Jewish refugees came through the port of Galveston by 1914. It wasn’t just Cockerell’s family who had forgotten; so had nearly everyone else too.
In the search for a Jewish homeland through the 19th and early 20th centuries, all manner of places were considered: Poland, Mexico, Australia, Canada. Perhaps fortunately, most of these schemes came to nothing.
When the British government offered territory in east Africa to the Zionist Congress in 1903, a fractious schism opened between Zionists prepared to contemplate the “Uganda Scheme” and those who rejected it out of hand. One enthusiast was the British playwright Israel Zangwill, founder of the Israel Territorial Organisation. “If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land Holy,” Zangwill declared.
In America, meanwhile, Jewish immigration had been soaring; by March 1908, the total Jewish population in the US had exceeded 1.5mn, with some 850,000 people settled in New York alone. Concern was mounting over what was perceived to be a lack of assimilation and growing anti-immigrant sentiment.
It was in 1906 that Zangwill met the financier Jacob Schiff, who pledged a remarkable half a million dollars to the plan to relocate Russian Jews to other parts of the US. The following year, The Washington Times reported the first “Colony of Hebrews Sailing for Texas”; many then travelled by train to cities as far-flung as San Antonio and New Orleans.
Weaving together excerpts from letters, diaries, memoirs and newspaper articles — there is no linking narrative beyond an introduction and brief afterword — Melting Point plunges us directly into primary source material. We read contemporary reactions to the founding of Zionism and horrifying eyewitness accounts of the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1903, when tsarist authorities in the city — then part of the Russian empire — permitted local gangs to murder and rape Jewish people at will.
Striking descriptions capture the raucous streets of Lower East Side New York and the oleander-scented promenades of Galveston alike. Also conveyed are the vibrant hopes and concerns of Jewish people who emigrated, expressed through correspondence, public debate, even theatre. Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot, staged in Washington DC in 1908, popularised the phrase and caused a sensation with its depiction of a Russian-Jewish family hoping for the best in a society free of ethnic strife (“America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are fusing and reforming”).
If the book has a limitation, it’s that the reader is left wondering what happened to the Galveston families; the documentary record is silent. Instead, the focus shifts to New York, then to the experiences of Jochelmann’s children and grandchildren in England, closing in the Levant, with contemporary reactions to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Nonetheless, Melting Point is a captivating exploration of identity and a search for belonging, a quest that reverberates into the present.
Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell Wildfire £25, 416 pages
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