BOOK REVIEW: In 2021, British writer Rachel Cockerell had plans for a book. She wanted to write about the colourful North London household in which her Jewish grandmother, Fanny, and her great-aunt, Sonia, had together raised their children in the 1940s.
Three years on, the author’s debut is bigger in scope and bolder in form than the family memoir she had imagined. Melting Point is an intensely researched and radically constructed account of some of the most significant events of 20th-century history.
Everything changed, she explains in the book’s preface, when she became curious about her great grandfather, David Jochelman. His sombre portrait had hung in the living room of Fanny and Sonia’s North London house, “his dark hair and dark clothes … a perfect metaphor for the obscurity he has fallen into since he died”. Cockerell knew only that Jochelman was a Kyiv businessman; he bought the Mapesbury Rd house after his arrival in England at the outbreak of World War I. “I googled him – just to see what, if anything, came up. A surprising number of search results appeared.”
Her great-grandfather, she learnt, was a prominent Zionist – a leading figure in a movement that, fuelled by growing antisemitism in late-1800s Europe, called for the creation of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. Jochelman’s starring role would be to manage the safe emigration of more than 10,000 mostly Russian Jews – not to the hoped-for Jerusalem, but to the Texas port of Galveston – in the lead-up to World War I.
“None of my family knew about this,” Cockerell writes. “Zionism is an unlikely place for this story to begin, but it set the trajectory for all that followed.”
Zionism was also, she admits, something she knew little about. She is, though, “an assiduous researcher”; her unravelling of the movement’s origins offered up two of the book’s most remarkable characters: Theodor Herzl, the charismatic Viennese journalist who founded the Zionist Organisation in 1896 with the publication of The Jewish State; and English-born writer Israel Zangwill, “the most famous Jewish figure in the English-speaking world at the turn of the century”.
Despite Herzl’s best efforts (“I have been occupied with a work of infinite grandeur”), his dreams of a Palestinian homeland didn’t eventuate in his lifetime. He died in 1904, leaving Zangwill’s offshoot “territorial organisation” to explore alternatives as varied and unlikely as Mexico, Canada, Angola and Australia. “If we cannot get to the Holy Land,” Zangwill said, “we can make another land holy.”
In 1907, that effort became focused on Jochelman’s first successful transportation of East European Jews into the US via Galveston. The final ship in the programme arrived in 1914. That year, Zangwill convinced Jochelman to move his family to London.
In the midst of her research, Cockerell made other, more personal, discoveries. Her great-grandfather had been married to a Lithuanian woman before his marriage to her great-grandmother. His son from that earlier union, Emjo Basshe, became a well-known playwright in 1920s New York. Basshe’s now-elderly daughter, Jo, had spent time in Mapesbury Rd in her youth and became a new, valuable source of first-hand family recollections.
Cockerell took a conventional writing approach in the book’s first draft – she is a big admirer of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes – weaving her own narrative through the diaries, memoirs, journalism, speeches, photographs and recordings she had gathered. But as she revised, she was irritated by her own interjections “and found myself reaching to delete them”. Melting Point would eventually became a book in which authorial presence is replaced almost entirely by a mosaic of carefully curated source material.
The effect is a seamless narrative of present-tense voices from the past – “more novel than history”, just as the author intended. Each voice is variously illuminating, sometimes shocking and often uncomfortably prescient. The Times, for example, responding to the renewed Jewish homeland debate post-WWII, offers a warning tap on the shoulder from 1946: “The Arabs at present living in Palestine dread and abhor the prospect of being reduced to a minority community in a country they have always regarded as their own.”
The technique is less compelling, though, when Cockerell revisits her more intimate family story. Something feels missing when the spirited voice of 93-year-old Jo, the author’s recently discovered cousin-once-removed, echoes in a lonely room. Then there’s Jochelman, her elusive great-grandfather, whose existence underpins the book but who, at its end, is unknowable – like Cockerell’s own Jewishness.
It’s a regret best encapsulated, she says, by fellow memoirist Laura Cumming in On Chapel Sands: “He is like all long-distant ancestors to me – these people of the past who elude us, no matter how hard we try to drag them back out of time’s tide.”
