Description
Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book
"Fabulous . . . One gets a thrilling sense of history unfolding in real time." —Matthew Reisz, The Guardian
This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.
On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamed, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. The journey marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the leadup to World War I.
The charismatic leader of the movement is Jochelmann’s closest friend, Israel Zangwill, whose novels have made him famous across Europe and America. As Eastern Europe becomes infected by antisemitic violence, Zangwill embarks on a desperate search for a temporary homeland—from Australia to Canada, Angola to Antarctica—before reluctantly settling on Galveston. He fears the Jewish people will be absorbed into the great American melting pot, but there is no other hope.
In a highly inventive style, Cockerell captures history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews into a vivid account. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York, and Jerusalem—as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.
Product Details
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publish Date | May 06, 2025 |
| Pages | 416 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780374609269 |
| Dimensions | 234.9 X 6.5 X 33.0 mm | 1.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
“Cockerell’s sui-generis genre perfectly suits the sweeping narrative she starts off telling. Stripped of any foreshadowing or explaining, her characters act and react out of impulse and exigency, turning the past back into the present day, even as we cannot un-know the future that bears down on them. The effect is chilling and exhilarating, like wading into the river of time to stand beside them. One can forgive almost any flaw in a book so doubly successful: its contents a resurrection, its form a revelation. [Dazzling].” —Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker
"Fabulous . . . 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." —Matthew Reisz, The Guardian
"Rachel Cockerell’s riveting and formally inventive narrative offers nothing less than an alternative history of the twentieth century, and of one of its most enduringly consequential movements . . . ... The radical implications of Cockerell’s narrative sneak up on you. But they are likely to linger long after the last page has been read." —D. D. Guttenplan, The Times Literary Supplement
"Astonishing . . . Melting Point plunges us directly into primary source material . . . Striking . . . A captivating exploration of identity and a search for belonging, a quest that reverberates into the present." —Alexander James, Financial Times
"Melting Point teleports like a literary Tardis, shifting seamlessly between late 19th-century Mitteleuropa, the tree-lined boulevards of Galveston a decade later, the Lower East Side of New York, [and] wartime London . . . Like Philippe Sands in East West Street . . . Cockerell uses her family history to frame a much broader narrative. —Adam LeBor, The Times (London)
"Eclectic [and] fascinating . . . The reader is left to consider how no family’s story can be disentangled from history’s complex web." —Erica Wagner, The New Statesman
"Cockerell made the ingenious decision to allow her source materials to tell this story . . . This multivocal narrative is entirely compelling, creating an extraordinary experience for the reader." —Bob Goldfarb, Jewish Book Council
“Rachel Cockerell’s meticulously researched and beautifully written book Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land . . . [creates] a new literary genre . . . The result is not only a robust history but a gripping story.” —Gideon Sylvester, The Jerusalem Post
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