Melting Point

Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

De: Rachel Cockerell

Narrado por: Henry Goodman, Rachel Cockerell

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

A New York Times Most Anticipated Book

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2025 Rachel Cockerell (P)2025 Macmillan Audio

Tasting history unfolding....

I have been so deeply moved by this powerful work. I've bought a copy for my brother, my ex-husband, my boyfriend and both my sons! I want them to read this work and feel touched by history the way I was. I can't begin to recommend it enough!

It did be Focus too much on Galveston. I thought that was the main idea for the book.

I saw the piece on MSNBC and it’s very interested in Jews going to Texas. It didn’t seem like the book focused on that much.

terribly annoying narration

I was initially enthusiastic about the idea of a history book told entirely through primary sources. But the melodramatic 19th century british-accented narration was annoying from the get-go and is a main reason that, despite conscious tenacity, I'm finally giving up at chapter 37. I enjoyed learning about the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, Israel Zangwill, Uganda and Galveston (early chapters). Less so the author's ancestors and the early 20th century progressive theatre scene in New York (later chapters). I would love to have read a great deal more about what became of the Jews who emmigrated through Galveston. Maybe the style of writing in the late 19th and early 20th century primary sources was itself...baroque...but IMHO the "Snidely Whiplash" performance ony serves to distance the modern reader further from the material.