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New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Jewish Promised Land in … Texas? Rachel Cockerell Had to Know More.
One summer day 10 years ago, Rachel Cockerell gathered with dozens of family members for a cousin's 80th birthday party in the North London house where her father had grown up. Among the guests were relatives from Israel. Cockerell had always known that alongside her impeccably Anglo ancestors, she had descended from Russian Jews through her father's mother. But she never knew her Granny Fanny; she had never celebrated Jewish holidays. A perennial jar of borscht in the cupboard had been the extent of her Jewishness. 'It was so peripheral in my vision,' she said recently. Something about spending the afternoon with Hebrew-accented cousins in the overgrown backyard of 22 Mapesbury Road sparked her imagination. Cockerell, who is now 30, Googled this branch's paterfamilias, her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. Up came his New York Times obituary from 1941. It stated: 'His name was a household word in Jewish homes throughout Eastern Europe.' That one sentence turned out to determine how she would spend much of the next several years of her life. Prowling century-old newspaper articles and digitized memoirs, Cockerell put Jochelmann's story at the heart of what became her first book, 'Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,' published last year in Britain and May 6 in the United States. 'This man, my great-grandfather, was never spoken about in my family, and if he was, he sounded deathly boring — a 'gray man,' as we say in London,' Cockerell, who grew up in Notting Hill, said over lunch in Brooklyn last week. But Jochelmann (spelled Jochelman in some sources) turned out to be the Zelig of early Zionism, which began as a political movement to address Jewish persecution roughly a half-century before Israel's founding in 1948. He worked closely with Israel Zangwill, the writer and activist who, in a 1908 play, coined 'the melting pot,' the trademark phrase of American assimilation. Jochelmann helped execute Zangwill's grandiose scheme that, beginning in 1907, relocated thousands of Russian Jews to Galveston, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. Decades later, in England, Jochelmann was personal assistant to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the Zionist right. His three children lived fascinating lives of their own in the United States, Britain and Israel. 'Melting Point'(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is not sui generis so much as multigenre: partly an immersive history of major events (early Zionism and the schism within its ranks); partly a nonfiction novel of ideas; partly a caper among fast-living bohemians; partly a family saga; and ultimately Cockerell's reclamation of her birthright. 'When I have been at Passover or in synagogues or at Hanukkah in Israel and America, I've seen what my family could have had, but didn't,' she said. 'This rich, ancient heritage of ritual, this culture that had been passed down however many years, ended with my grandmother or my dad — it definitely was not something that I inherited.' In fact, much of Jochelmann's story was new even to Cockerell's father, Michael, a prominent British political journalist who grew up with a portrait of his grandfather staring from the wall of 22 Mapesbury. 'It feels very odd to have a book written about my family without me really recognizing much of what I knew,' Michael said in a phone interview. He was particularly struck by the book's documentation of the antisemitic attacks that helped spur both Zionism and efforts such as what came to be called the Galveston Movement. 'There is a lot of my own ancestry,' he said, 'I hadn't realized was as awful as that.' Rachel Cockerell is less a presence than she might have been because of her book's unusual style. After composing half a draft in the manner of a typical nonfiction volume, she cut all her own prose. 'Melting Point' has a short preface, a brief afterword and some reproductions of faded photographs and paintings. It otherwise consists entirely of quotations: from newspaper articles, from speeches, from writings of obscure figures, from interviews Cockerell conducted with family members. Separated into blocks, they last anywhere from one sentence to a few paragraphs and are adorned with minimalist sourcing in the margins: 'Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1903,' 'Weymouth Gazette,' 'Israel Zangwill,' 'Mimi.' Cockerell found that attempts at paraphrasing just didn't work for her. Inspired by the George Saunders novel 'Lincoln in the Bardo,' which is organized as a kind of oral history, she strove to make the book personal through authorial curation. 'My favorite thing people have said to me after reading the book,' she said, 'is, 'It feels like it's written in your voice.'' The Guardian called the method 'deeply immersive and dramatic.' The New Yorker described how effectively sources were 'coaxed by Cockerell, who has a keen ear and fine sense of timing, into becoming some of recent literature's most compelling narrators.' Substantively as well, 'Melting Point' is not the book Cockerell set out to write after that birthday party in 2015. She was expecting to compose a Jewish family memoir along the lines of Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare With Amber Eyes.' But Cockerell, who studied art history as an undergraduate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and received a master's degree in journalism at City University, found her attention increasingly captured by the larger currents of Jewish history in which her great-grandfather played a first marginal, and then increasingly prominent, role. It would be necessary, she felt, to explore beyond the exclusive lens of her own family. And so the book's first half revolves around Zangwill and his notion of 'territorialism,' which diverged from Zionism's insistence on a Jewish territory in the Jews' ancient homeland. Prompted partly by an infamous 1903 pogrom in the Russian city of Kishinev, territorialists held as an intermediate goal a Jewish territory anywhere one could be gotten — 'Zionism without Zion,' as The Jewish Chronicle described it. Locales that were considered included East Africa ('Is it to be Jewganda?'), Australia, Mexico, Mesopotamia, Paraguay, Canada and Angola. A then-Ottoman part of modern-day Libya called Cyrenaica was ultimately rejected over a lack of water ('An Unpromising Land,' declared The Evening Standard). Galveston, a Gulf Coast port, was conceived not as a Jewish territory but as an entry point to the interior United States, as opposed to the East Coast cities — above all, New York — where Russian Jewish immigrants were already concentrated. Territorialism is a decidedly less-known aspect of Zionist history. In an interview, Adam L. Rovner, the director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, called Zangwill an 'amazing, imaginative man,' whose vision fell out of favor. 'His pragmatism,' Rovner added, 'blinded him to the pursuit of the dream that has had undeniable success.' Though not Cockerell's relation, it is Zangwill who above all leaps off the pages of her book. He was 'the homeliest man I ever saw,' according to one source; 'negligent of his apparel,' according to another; and 'with a face that suggests nothing so much as one of those sculptured gargoyles in a medieval cathedral,' in the words of The New York Herald. (The descriptions could veer into antisemitism.) Yet he was tremendously charismatic. And also pragmatic, not only as a territorialist but as a mentor and a friend. In 1913, he urged Jochelmann to leave Kyiv, not for one of Zangwill's hoped-for Jewish territories, but for London. 'They are destined to become English,' Zangwill insisted of Fanny, Cockerell's grandmother, and her sister, Sonia. Following Zangwill's story, the book shifts to 1920s Greenwich Village, where David's son Emanuel Jochelmann ended up a playwright under the name Em Jo Basshe. Though he worked in an experimental collective with John Dos Passos, he achieved less renown: One review remarked of the unfortunate hero of a Basshe play, 'He suffered almost as much as his audience.' To capture this branch of the family, Cockerell spoke with Basshe's daughter, who is now 95 and lives in Canada, nearly every week for two years. The book goes on to explore the middle-class lives of Jochelmann's two daughters and their children in postwar London and Israel. Capital-H history is glimpsed in passing: a London protest against Hitler in 1933; the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel by a Jewish militia; an older woman's reminiscences of herself as a young girl spying telltale arm tattoos on Israeli bus passengers. A sub-current throughout 'Melting Point' speaks to present-day debates over what might be called the Palestinian question. 'The principal difficulty is that Palestine is already the homeland of another people,' one source observes; at the close of the 1940s another reports: 'The once all-Arab cities of Jaffa, Ramleh and Acre are now filling up with new Jewish immigrants.' The stories and quotations bump and jostle, leaving the reader to decide what might be the book's central tension: How does its first half — the history of Zionism and its failed alternative, territorialism — connect to the second half, which depicts a Jewish family's assimilation? As part of her reporting, Cockerell celebrated Passover and Hanukkah for the first time, in Israel. She ate fish tacos on the Galveston beach with a longtime local rabbi and his wife, a descendant of Jews who arrived there a century earlier as part of her great-grandfather's movement. 'My family has melted into the melting pot, and I can't be too sad about that,' Cockerell said. 'Because I am the textbook example of assimilation, I can't resent it.' Still, Cockerell seems glad that her family past includes moments of assimilation's opposite. 'I feel bad for the gentile side of my family,' she said. 'My uncles on my mom's side asking, 'When are you going to write about us?' It's like: Absolutely never. Sorry, guys.'
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
24 Books Coming in May
The Director This biographical novel centered on the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst doubles as a study of art in the shadow of totalitarianism. After finding fame with silent films like 'Pandora's Box,' Pabst finds himself stuck in Europe as the Nazis come to power and compelled to make movies for the Reich. Will he manage to retain his integrity while keeping himself and his family out of danger? Kehlmann imagines a series of impossible challenges for Pabst, from meetings with Goebbels to film shoots that are doomed from the start. Melting Point This formally inventive family history took an unexpected turn after Cockerell discovered that her great-grandfather, a London businessman, had been a prominent early Zionist, eventually persuading 10,000 Jews to leave Russia not for Palestine but for Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s. The resulting book, fashioned from letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles and recordings, brings vivid life to a forgotten chapter of the Jewish search for a homeland. Second Life In 2020, Hess, a culture critic for The New York Times who focuses on the digital world, discovered firsthand what it means to have a baby in our very online era. From conspiracy wormholes to nursing influencers, the big-money baby industrial complex to surveillance culture, Hess examines what it means to have — and be — a child in a world shaped by troubling, fascinating and ever-shifting alternate realities. Sleep In the debut novel by a senior editor at The Atlantic, a newly divorced mother of two young daughters is haunted by disturbing memories from her idyllic-seeming childhood in suburban New Jersey. As she reads one personal essay after another by women detailing their respective traumas — the protagonist is herself a magazine editor at the height of the #MeToo era — she is forced her to confront her unresolved feelings regarding her own. The Emperor of Gladness A depressed Vietnamese American teenager becomes the unlikely caretaker for an elderly woman with dementia in Vuong's second novel, which promises to challenge the familiar narrative of growth and transformation. 'If you don't improve your life in the traditional ways,' Vuong asked in a video introducing the book, 'does that mean your life is worthless?' The Boy From the Sea It's 1973 in a fishing village on the west coast of Ireland where only the weather causes much of a stir. Then, like a miracle, a barrel washes ashore and inside is a 'baby, pink, eyes wide to the grey sky, well wrapped.' Carr, a Y.A. novelist making his adult debut, follows the fortunes of the boy, Brendan; the struggling couple who take him in; and the neighbors whose lives are upended by his arrival. Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a lot of things before he became the peerless writer known as Mark Twain: typesetter, riverboat pilot, journalist, Confederate militiaman, miner, businessman and more. Chernow's voluminous biography presents Twain with all his complications and flaws — disastrous financial decisions, his evolving views on race — in this account both of the man and of a nation torn apart by war and stitched painfully back together, all of it brightened by Twain's signature humor and wisdom. Capitalism and Its Critics Landing during a period of global economic turmoil, this meaty history by a longtime New Yorker staff writer tells the story of capitalism's ascent through a provocative prism: its critics — including a host of lesser known figures, from the labor activist Flora Tristan to contemporary champions of degrowth. Their stories illustrate how, in its lurching cycles of prosperity and contraction, capitalism 'is always in crisis, recovering from crisis, or heading toward the next crisis.' Apple in China Drawing on hundreds of internal memos, emails and interviews with former Apple employees, including engineers and executives, McGee, a Financial Times writer, flips the popular narrative of the company's relationship with China on its head. It is not simply that Apple has taken advantage of China's low-wage supply chain capabilities to drive up profits: In training and equipping a Chinese manufacturing operation larger than the entire labor force of California, Apple, he argues, has made itself — and the West — increasingly vulnerable to a 'ruthless authoritarian state.' Wild Thing As unconventional as it was influential, Paul Gauguin's boldly colored, formally inventive artwork inspired painters from Van Gogh and Picasso to the German Expressionists. In this new biography, Prideaux draws on recently recovered documents and artifacts to dispel myths about the Frenchman, often depicted as a dissolute libertine, who escaped Paris for Tahiti and championed the rights of its native inhabitants — the subjects of his most notable canvases. What Will People Think? Like a latter-day Mrs. Maisel, the heroine of this debut novel tries to keep her stand-up comedy aspirations a secret from her tradition-minded family. But the time and place are very different: Mia is a contemporary Palestinian American with a day job at a New York media company and a crush on her boss. Hamdan intersperses Mia's juggling act with excerpts from a diary kept by her grandmother in 1940s Palestine, demonstrating how the need for love and belonging can cross generations. The Book of Records The fourth novel by the Canadian author of 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing' is an imaginative work of historical fiction about a father and daughter residing in a mysterious 'no man's land' called the Sea, after being exiled from their home in Foshan, China. In the Sea, centuries overlap as the daughter, 7-year-old Lina, comes to know her fellow travelers, including a Tang dynasty poet, a 17th-century Dutch scholar and a Jewish philosopher fleeing Nazi Germany. Gingko Season Since having her heart broken two years ago, Penelope Lin, the 20-something protagonist of Elegant's debut novel, has remained closed off to love and sex — spending her days working in a Philadelphia museum, organizing its archive of hundreds of shoes for Qing dynasty women with bound feet. Then she meets Hoang, a cancer researcher who's just turned himself in for releasing the lab mice he was supposed to euthanize, and whose unguarded demeanor will gradually release Penelope from the confinement of her own self-protection. Spent Throuples, lockdown, pickleball, peak TV — these are just a few of the au courant subjects the author of 'Fun Home' takes on in her latest, and especially sardonic, graphic novel. Also: inequality, book bans and many, many goats. In the words of Bechdel's illustrated alter ego (still short-haired, spectacled and wry), 'When did life get so complicated?' Is a River Alive? Through Macfarlane's eyes, the natural world is a thrilling place, rife with meaning and poetic beauty. For his latest book, the British author, whose best-selling 'Underland' explored the mysterious realm beneath the earth's surface, takes us to far-flung cloud forests, lagoons, creeks and streams, urging us to consider our river systems as living things, entitled to the same reverence and legal protections as human beings. Original Sin This exposé by Tapper — CNN's chief Washington correspondent, a best-selling thriller writer and occasional Donald Trump punching bag — and Thompson, a political reporter for Axios, promises a devastating accounting of Joe Biden's fateful decision to run for a second term and of the politicians, staffers and donors who witnessed the president's decline but covered it up, deluding themselves and the public that he could still win. Who Knew The billionaire media mogul's fingerprints are all over cherished movies and TV shows like 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' 'Cheers' and 'The Simpsons.' While his memoir spends plenty of time on his Beverly Hills roots and Hollywood career, the juiciest bits may be Diller's chronicles of his romantic life: from years in the closet to falling in love with the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, whom he married in 2001. Murder in the Dollhouse The Duloses seemed to be living the dream: college sweethearts who were raising a family in an upscale Connecticut enclave. But a bitter divorce turned deadly when Jennifer Dulos disappeared and her husband and his mistress were implicated in her murder. Cohen turns this tabloid whodunit into a searching examination of the American dream, our fascination with lurid tragedy and the cost of perfection. Harmattan Season Noir meets fantasy in Onyebuchi's latest, about a chronically unlucky private eye who gets roped into a simmering war in French-colonized West Africa after a woman shows up bleeding at his house, mysteriously vanishes and then reappears floating in the sky, dead. The South Set over the course of one languid summer, 'The South' follows the intertwining dramas of a Malaysian family grappling with expectations and personal secrets at their remote, run-down farm. At the center of the story is Jay, the family's young, queer son, who finds himself developing a tense friendship/possible romance with the farm manager's rebellious son. Along Came Amor Daria concludes her Primas of Power series with a steamy, emotional story of love after heartbreak. Ava was crushed when her husband left, leaving her to pick up the pieces of her life. So when a chance encounter with a wealthy hotelier offers her a night of escape, she seizes it. But her no-strings fling gets decidedly knotty when she shows up at her cousin's engagement party to discover that Roman, her one-night stand, is the groom's best man. Never Flinch King interweaves two story lines in his latest novel, bringing back the brilliant and eccentric investigator Holly Gibney. The first narrative begins with an anonymous letter threatening to kill '13 innocents and one guilty' as a bizarre act of retribution; the police detective put on the case turns to Holly for help. The second follows a feminist writer on a lecture circuit that has been disrupted by a violent stalker; who better to hire for protection than Holly? King raises the stakes — and the body count — as the twin plots converge, with a cast of new and familiar characters searching for answers. The Last Supper While crosses burned behind her and a Black saint came to life, Madonna sang 'Like a Prayer' — and accusations of blasphemy followed. That 1989 music video brouhaha was one of many instances in which 'art, faith, sex and controversy' exploded into view in the pop culture of the 1980s, Elie argues. Other 'cryptoreligious' creative figures in his book include Martin Scorsese, Toni Morrison and Prince. When It All Burns Thomas is a firefighter with the Los Padres Hotshots — a squad responsible for battling some of California's wickedest megafires — and an anthropologist. The combination makes for a riveting story of the costs of climate change and the realities of this terrifying work, as well as an examination of the history that got us here and the very real lives now at risk.
