MELTING POINT

Multivocal history, focusing on the author’s family, of the European Jewish diaspora.

Part of Cockerell’s family arrived in London from Ukraine when World War I broke out, and for her great-grandfather, in some ways, “his pre-war existence belonged to a lost world.” That existence included work in the highest reaches of Theodor Herzl’s original Zionist movement, which sought a homeland in an unfriendly world. With Herzl and, importantly, the largely forgotten intellectual and writer Israel Zangwill, David Jochelmann sought that homeland across the globe, including by means of the so-called Galveston Plan, where 10,000 Jews arrived in the U.S. by way of the Texas port, “sent there from Russia by my great-grandfather.” With a narrative whose voices are drawn from a vast range of published sources—books, letters, newspaper and journal articles—Cockerell gives shape to Jochelmann, perhaps the least known of the Zionist leaders. Along the way she looks at the slow elaboration of what would become the Jewish nation: at one point Palestine, which the New York Sun called “smaller than the State of New Jersey,” and later, in a misbegotten episode, British East Africa, “one of the few sections of Africa where white men may thrive,” which led to a rebellion against Herzl by many followers, intent on settling in Palestine instead. For many, the destination proved to be New York City, with the Tribune opining, “Few outside the Jewish world appreciate the vast difficulties involved in the Americanization of the Russian Hebrew,” while the financier Jacob Schiff urged that “the Jew of the future is, to my mind, the Russian Jew transformed by American methods.” Jochelmann himself (losing the second “n” after arriving) went to London, helping organize anti-Nazi resistance but dying before the horrors of the Holocaust became known, and before the independent Jewish state he envisioned took shape.

An innovative, rewarding contribution to Jewish history.