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

Long-listed 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 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, a forgotten episode in US history in which ten thousand Jews fled the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire for the Gulf Coast.

In the wake of a dramatic split in the early Zionist movement, a group of rebels impatient for an alternative to Palestine formed a rival organization. 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.

In Melting Point, 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.