08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Melting Point' revisits the push to move Europe's Jews to Texas
When Rachel Cockerell embarked on her first book, she thought she was writing a conventional family memoir. She was in her 20s, unpublished and stuck at home in London during the pandemic. Intrigued by conversations with distant Jewish cousins at a family reunion, she had begun to research her grandmother, Fanny Jochelman, who had come from Russia to London as a child to a sprawling, chaotic house at 22 Mapesbury Rd., later raising her own four children there. Cockerell didn't know how radically her project and its form would change. When the unclassifiable 'Melting Point,' about a forgotten chapter of Jewish migration in the early 20th century, was published last year in England, it was met with excitement and acclaim, including being longlisted for the prestigious Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize. It was published in the United States on Tuesday by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
