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

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A race of some twelve million people has no square inch of land that it can call its own... If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.'In the early 1900s, 10, 000 persecuted Jews left Europe to forge a new life. They went not to Israel, as so often dreamed, but to Texas, USA. Using a unique blend of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and interviews, Melting Point is the story of Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who was instrumental in the Texas movement, and the scattered lives of his three children: one of whom went to New York, one to London, and one to Jerusalem. The book opens at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the charismatic Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl trying and failing to found a Jewish state. Against a backdrop of increasingly violent, antisemitic pogroms in Czarist Russia and overcrowding in New York, numerous options for a new Jewish homeland from Uganda to Australia were mooted but only one, Galveston in Texas, was attempted. As WW1 approached, Rachel's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, 'recruited' over 10, 000 Jews to leave everything behind and go there with him. The leader of the movement was his close friend Israel Zangwill, one of most famous Jewish figures in the world, who coined the term 'Melting Pot' to describe America. Melting Point follows David, and later his children in turn, through two world wars as each is faced with the choice of whether to cling to the place they came from, or melt into their new surroundings.Melting Point follows David, and his children as each is faced with the choice of whether to cling to the place they came from, or melt into their new surroundings. What's unique here is that Rachel tells this story by linking together the voices of dozens of accounts from numerous sources including diaries, letters, autobiographies and newspapers, as well as oral interviews Rachel has conducted.