When the new book, Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell came across our desk, we knew we needed to read it with archival search fields at the ready. It’s a miraculous document and, in its own way, a refreshing, insightful and engrossing account of the American Jewish experience traced from an idea of Zion, to a pilgrimage to Galveston Texas, to the theaters of New York City, and to Jewish family homes in London, before, during, and after WW2. Indeed, Melting Point is a family story that’s actually the story of the modern Zionist movement and its offshoots. It’s a nonfiction book that takes an unconventional form, relying on primary sources—newspaper clippings, letters, interviews—and that’s it.
Cockerell has created a novelistic portrait of a family, a movement, of a pogrom-fearing wave of Jewish immigration to America from Russia, and of the Jewish philanthropists who funded these endeavors. It’s a polyphonic story that’s center is this curator who refuses to be seen. There has been a good amount of coverage of the book, released last year in the UK and last month in the US. We interviewed her a few weeks ago over Zoom. What follows is a slightly edited version of that conversation.
Berman Archive: For those not familiar with Melting Point, what is this book about and how did you go about writing it?
Rachel Cockerell: The short answer is that it’s about my great-grandfather who helped 10,000 Russian Jews get to Texas in the early 20th century. The longer answer is that it’s a story about migration and assimilation. It’s partly about my family, and partly about the founding of Zionism and how that led to my family ending up in London, which seems like a strange trajectory, but I traced my family’s roots further and further back and found that the reason my family is where they are now is because of Theodor Herzl, who founded modern Zionism. So it’s really a story of the melting pot of America and the melting pot of London.
I really just wanted to write a normal book. I had read a few Jewish family memoirs, like The Hare with Amber Eyes. I knew vaguely that I had some Jewish ancestry. My grandmother had come to London from the Russian Empire as a child, speaking Russian. She was Russian Jewish, but I didn’t really know much more than that. So I thought I would explore my grandmother and her father and my family’s life, and then I discovered this weird set of words—the Galveston movement or the Galveston Project—and that my great-grandfather had been involved. I realized that this book could not just be a straightforward family memoir. I just wanted to write a normal-looking book. All nonfiction books are primary sources interwoven with the narrator’s voice. If I could take my own voice out and tell the whole story through the eyes of those who were there, one primary source leading into the next. I find when I’m reading nonfiction books that the best bits are the quotations. You don’t ever really want the author to paraphrase something. I hope that this book doesn’t really feel experimental as you’re reading it. It just feels more immediate than it would if it had my voice in there.
The digitization of archives has just been such a gift to historians, and the Berman archive was such a gift to me.
Berman Archive: Was the Berman Archive useful to your process at all?
Rachel Cockerell: Yes, it was. I realized at a certain point that there was going to be this character in the book, Morris Waldman, who is a New York Jew who gets recruited to move to Galveston and help set up the Galveston Movement. Waldman wrote just this amazing account of not only the Galveston movement but his journey from New York to Texas by train in, I think, 1907. Seeing this landscape, this American landscape rolled by as you got closer to Texas, seeing the cowboys in their cowboy boots that he had read about in stories as a child. Then arriving in Galveston and the oleander lined boulevards, it was just so vivid. He wrote all this in a series of articles when he was, I think, an older man. These articles I stumbled upon one day in the Berman archive. I thought, “Wow, I’ve struck gold.” I remember thinking, “Whoever digitized this has just sort of brought my whole book together.” I felt like Waldman was this missing piece of the puzzle. He wrote so beautifully, and it was in something called the Social Service Quarterly, which I wouldn’t have found in one million years otherwise. And that made me think, “Thank God for archives, thank God for digitization.” The digitization of archives has just been such a gift to historians, and the Berman archive was such a gift to me.
Berman Archive: The first two-thirds of the book are mostly letters and news clippings, and you just feel the immediacy of it. Also in the language, too. Even some of the disjunctions or discrepancies between different interpretations were interesting. They didn’t need to be smoothed over because I understood what I was reading. That’s part of the trickiness of history, too.
Rachel Cockerell: Right? That was something I was always thinking about. The trickiness of history and the unreliability of memory. You can find this line in the book: “You can’t trust witnesses.” Writing nonfiction, who can you trust if you can’t trust witnesses? The whole of history is made up of people’s dodgy memories. People’s unreliable, shifting memories of things. So, yeah, that was a huge part of the book, juxtaposing people’s recollections, which seemed to contradict each other, so that these voices from the past were almost in conversation with each other, almost arguing with each other, saying, “That was like this.”
Berman Archive: Do you consider Melting Point a work of history?
Rachel Cockerell: It is nonfiction because I didn’t make anything up, but it’s not really a history book or a history textbook because it is a narrative. There’s so much that I cut. I was always thinking about the story and the plot and the characters, maybe in a quite novelistic way. My rule was that I couldn’t add anything, but I could take away as much as I wanted. So, I thought more about maintaining high energy rather than creating a comprehensive history of early Zionism and the early 20th century.
Berman Archive: The American section of the book ends with a passage that takes a leap in time, from the 1930s all the way to a letter to the editor of Drama Review from 1973. The letter corrects the way the author of the 1927 play Earth is written. In the article the author is “Jo Em Basshe” but the letter writer explains that the name is actually Em Jo Basshe; they were friends. The implication is that Em Jo, a person we learn about in great detail in this section of your book as a product of the Russian Jewish migration to Gavelston, son of a Zionist figure, is now so obscure that theatre writers have never heard of him. This life and world is inflated through your curation and punctured by the vagaries of time. To me, this moment is a poignant and a helpful signpost about the ephemerality of a life in history. I’m curious to hear what you were thinking with that passage?
Rachel Cockerell: That means a lot to me because no one has ever actually ever mentioned that 1973 passage. I remember when I found that line. I think it was in 2019, maybe early 2020, and I found it poignant. Our collective memory is so short-term, and everything gets extinguished so quickly. There’s a line from W. G. Sebald in the introduction about “how little we can hold in mind… how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself.” I guess I found that in my own family. The fact that my great-grandfather had quite a dramatic life, rebelling from the Zionist movement and creating a movement to bring 10,000 Jews to Texas, had been forgotten in my own family. So, yeah, including that 1973 passage was partly about how quickly everything gets forgotten and trying to drag things back from the tide. Then, I guess it was the way memory is able to just leap over the decades so effortlessly. It’s almost as if the decades are swirling around your mind. You know, the fact that we all go through our lives being in the present and then remembering something from 2008 and then jumping to 2019 and then being in 1999. The past isn’t chronological in the mind. This whole book is a collection of memories. So I just wanted to show how quickly the past can jump from 1930 to 1973.
Berman Archive: What did you discover about the language or writing of the times a hundred years ago?
Rachel Cockerell: I feel like the turn of the 20th century was a sweet spot for language. It feels so modern in a way that writing from 50 years earlier doesn’t, and yet, it’s still beautiful and poetic. No one ever really uses a cliche. People are so candid, and even newspaper journalists from 1900 in their local paper will just use the most beautiful turn of phrase. I think that was the biggest joy for me. Writing this book was just spending years reading all this incredible writing from so long ago, which felt so modern. Sometimes it took my breath away with how beautiful and weird it was.
Berman Archive: What was your most unexpected discovery in an archive?
Rachel Cockerell: The one that comes to mind is that my great-grandfather had been initially planning to move with his family to America, maybe to Texas or maybe to New York, and then just as World War I broke out, he found himself in London and Israel. [Israel] Zangwill persuaded him to move permanently to London. I guess that made me see that it’s just these almost snap decisions made by your ancestors which determine your life and determine your identity. I think of myself as British to the core or a Londoner to the core, and it’s just because of some spontaneous decision made a hundred years ago. So I think that was probably the biggest surprise. The past was not this sort of black and white, two-dimensional place. I was writing this during the pandemic, and it seemed to be almost more vivid than the present. I was living more in 1900 than I was in 2020.
