During a break between lectures to the Basel Jewish community, I headed to the city’s concert hall where the Zionist movement was born. The building looks exactly as it did when the first Zionist Congress was held there in 1897.As a symphony orchestra rehearsed on the stage, I was transported back to the days of the Congress. All around me, I saw top-hatted gentlemen speaking in German, English, Yiddish, and Russian.
At the helm stood the majestic figure of Theodor Herzl, directing the discussions as if “playing thirty-two games of chess simultaneously.” I was mesmerized by this place where, after thousands of years of statelessness and impotence, the Jewish people reclaimed control over their destiny.
Rarely have I felt the hand of God hover so powerfully over a place.
Rachel Cockerell’s meticulously researched and beautifully written book Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land conjures up Congress and its repercussions. Creating a new literary genre, the author narrates the entire story by weaving together eyewitness accounts from diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and interviews.Some of these extracts are hilariously funny; others are heartbreaking. The result is not only a robust history but a gripping story.
Whereas it’s fashionable to focus on the Dreyfus Affair or the Holocaust as the catalysts for the creation of Israel, Cockerell’s approach is different. She takes us back to Kishinev in 1903. There, following a blood libel, Russian mobs beat, tortured, raped, and killed Jews.
That horrific massacre and the subsequent pogroms shocked the world and gave urgency to the search for a refuge for the tormented Jews of Eastern Europe. It also marked the beginning of a split in the Zionist movement.The religious Jews of Eastern Europe constituted one wing. Even the two delegates from Kishinev remained resolute that, no matter what, the Jewish homeland must be in the Land of Israel. When the idea of a temporary refuge in Uganda was floated, they sat on the floor, weeping like mourners for the loss of the Holy Land.
The Jewish Territorial Organization
The other wing, which is the focus of this book, was led by British author Israel Zangwill, and Cockerell’s great-grandfather Dr. David Jochelman. Zangwill was totally assimilated and committed to the assimilation of his people, an idea celebrated in his play The Melting Pot. Jochelman came from a hassidic family and returned to tradition at the end of his life.
Together, they were driven to find any refuge they could for their persecuted people. To this end, they founded the Jewish Territorial Organization, which combed the globe for a potential Jewish homeland. Candidates included areas of Kenya, Canada, and Australia. As representatives investigated the recommended territories, they found that they all shared one thing in common: They were uninhabitable.
Eventually, Zangwill and Jochelman chose Gavelston, Texas. With philanthropic support, they established 150 offices across Russia to facilitate the emigration of two million Russian Jews to Galveston. The new arrivals had much to cope with. They did not speak a word of English, their clothes were unsuitable for the climate, and the towns they were brought to were often incomplete, with shacks instead of houses and mud paths instead of roads.
The scheme collapsed just before World War I, as America grew uncomfortable with this colonization. But, in seven years, this forerunner of Nefesh B’Nefesh brought 10,000 Russian Jews to America, providing them with an ever-improving lifestyle and shielding them from murderous mobs, Hitler, and Stalin.
With the collapse of the scheme, Jochelman went to London, where he led Anglo Jewry’s massive protests against Hitler. In another of the family’s important contributions to Zionism, his son-in-law became the right-hand man of Zionist prophet Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Together, they toured prewar Europe, imploring Jews to make aliyah before the impending catastrophe.Jochelman’s own London home became a refuge for his family. Cockerell offers wonderfully humorous descriptions of the 13 refugees living in one house in the aftermath of the war. By the end of those chapters, we know the family well, and we love them.
But the house divides. Half the family makes aliyah to Jerusalem, where they maintain Jewish traditions. The other half watch from afar. Now, through their own words, we follow the Londoners as they intermarry and assimilate. Earlier in the book, we hear about a Passover Seder at which no one really knows what to do.
Now we see the withering of their Judaism, which in turn alienates the Londoners from their Israeli cousins.Here lies the tragic irony of this book. The author comes from the London branch of the family. A descendant of hassidim and Zionist activists, Cockerell writes compellingly about our people’s wanderings, the need for a Jewish homeland, and her family’s fight to create it.
Yet, through no fault of her own, she is not Jewish in any way. As she puts it, ”As a third-generation immigrant, I feel I’ve melted into the melting pot.” Perhaps this best captures the dilemmas and struggles of her narrative.In any case, this book is outstanding. If you love Jewish and Zionist history and the issues they raise, or you just enjoy a good story, you are in for a treat.
- MELTING POINT: FAMILY, MEMORY AND THE SEARCH FOR A PROMISED LAND
- By Rachel Cockerell
- Wildfire
- 580 pages; $32
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