← Totally Booked with Zibby
Totally Booked with Zibby
Rachel Cockerell, MELTING POINT: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
00:22:29
Loading summary
Transcript49 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi listeners, we have totally booked live coming up this fall and I hope you'll be a part of it. We have three events in New York City, September 19th, 25th and 30th in New York where I'll be doing six interviews live each day. We also have a petite retreat in Greenwich on October 4th. Go to zibbemedia.com and event or and or eventbrite and search the events and please come. I can't wait to meet you in person.
- [00:31]
B
Listen up. You can get the new iPhone 16e with Apple Intelligence for just $49.99 when you switch to Boost Mobile. We pulled so many all nighters to give you this deal and hey, stop messing with the mic. I'm just helping this catch people's attention. This is a great deal. Exactly. So it doesn't need all that.
- [00:51]
A
Fine.
- [00:52]
B
Get the new iPhone 16e available at Apple Store locations and the Apple Store online. Visit your nearest Boost Mobile store for full offer details. Apple Intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. Restrictions apply.
- [01:02]
A
Hey everyone, I'm Michel Norris, here to welcome you to your mama's kitchen.
- [01:06]
B
Every Tuesday we bring you new stories from the childhood kitchens of fun.
- [01:11]
A
Guests like Stephen Colbert, John Legend, Ina Garten, Big Frida, Roy Wood. So many more people. I'll talk to guests who are artists.
- [01:19]
B
Actors, chefs, musicians and more about how.
- [01:22]
A
The food and the culinary traditions of their youth shape their lives in interesting.
- [01:27]
B
And sometimes surprising ways.
- [01:29]
A
It's delicious. Make sure to listen wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode has been sponsored by Digipod. As someone who's passionate about books and authors, I'm always excited to share resources that can help bring your stories to life. That's why I am thrilled to tell you about Digipod, a print on demand company that truly understands what authors need to be. Make that happen. Here's what I love about Digipod. They don't just print your books and send you on your way. Their team holds your hand throughout the entire process with incredible customer service. They deliver professional grade printing quality, consistently beat their competitors turnaround times, and they can handle rush orders. They simplify the whole printing process and make it incredibly easy to achieve your vision for your books. Head over to Digipod Zibby that's D I G G y p o d.com Zybee set up a free 15 minute printing consultation and get 10% off your first print order. You'll talk with their experts who will walk you through exactly how to set up your print job and answer all your questions. And by the way, I've seen the books and they are amazing looking. If you've been thinking about printing your book, this is the support you want. Again, that's digipod.com zibby for your free consultation. Hi, this is Zibby Owens and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books in my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know, get insider insights and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow me on Instagram. Iby Owens Rachel Cockrell is the author of Melting Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land. Rachel is a writer and historian, born and raised in London. Her first book, Melting Point, is an experimental history about her family's search for a promised land. It centers around the Galveston Movement, a long forgotten project that brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas before World War I. They were led by her great grandfather. Five years of research took her to Ohio, Michigan, Texas, New New York, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Melting Point has been praised by the New York Times, Washington Post, and the New Yorker, which called it magnificent, like wading into the river of time. Rachel has spoken about her work on CNN, NBC, the BBC and at TEDx. Welcome Rachel. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Melting Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land. Congratulations.
- [04:29]
B
Thank you so much Zibby.
- [04:31]
A
Thank you. Well, this book is so incredibly timely and informative and I wish sort of everybody could read this and understand a lot of the history of things that people are talking about right now with such passion in the news and elsewhere. Why don't you talk about the book and your unique method of writing it and all the rest?
- [04:54]
B
Yeah, sure. So I started this book in 2019. I had read a few other Jewish family memoirs like the Hair with the Amber Eyes by Edmond Duvall, and I thought I knew vaguely that I had some Jewish ancestry. I knew that my grandmother was Russian Jewish, but I had very limited knowledge about her and how and when she came to England. But I thought I wanted to write this sort of quite straightforward family memoir set in North London in the 1940s. My dad grew up in a house, 22 Mapesbury Road, with his siblings, his parents, his cousins and their parents, and also his very Russian grandmother and her sister. So it was this, it was really like a pocket of Russian Jewish life in North London. I mean, I'm sure that, you know, on, on their street there were probably several other houses like that. But really I just wanted to write about post war London and my dad's childhood. A sort of quite narrow sort of domestic story. And then I began to ask how and why my family came to England when they did. And I found out that the Jockermans, as they were called, arrived in London from the Russian Empire just as World War I broke out. So I thought I should maybe start the book with that. And I began researching my great grandfather. And that's when the book sort of took a turn. I realized that my great grandfather was probably, had probably the most dramatic life out of anyone in our family. And yet he has been completely forgotten. You know, my dad could tell me nothing about him. His mother, my grandmother never, never mentioned him. He was one of the first Zionists and then abandoned the Zionist movement. There was a sort of split in Zionism in the early 1900s. It was in all the newspaper headlines at the time, Zionism Splits. And this sort of rival group had a motto. If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy. They thought we've got to find a temporary Jewish refuge somewhere on Earth. And they searched the whole world. And the temporary Jewish refuge they found was Galveston, Texas.
- [06:58]
A
And you write all about the Galveston Plan and your great grandfather's involvement there. And I feel like you should give a little background because there were, as you point out in the book, a couple other places that they were very seriously considering and debating in this world Jewish Congress with Theodore Herzl and why they ended up picking Palestine versus any other place. And you even have the headlines the UK or whatever. Not the uk obviously Great Britain Gives Land away and all of this. So can you just give a little synopsis of how that decision was made?
- [07:37]
B
Yeah, sure. So my book is called Melting Point and the subtitle is Family Memory and the Search for a Promised Land. And this search for a promised land has really been forgotten. I guess the only sort of alternative promised land that some people know about is the Uganda Plan as it was called, which was this slightly sort of far fetched idea very early in the days of modern Zionism of creating a Jewish homeland in East Africa. Theodore Herzl had approached the British government and said, we need somewhere for The Jews to gather to sort of colonize. And the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, father of the much more famous Neville Chamberlain, said, I have seen a land for you on my travels, Dr. Herzl. And that's Uganda. English roses blessed bloom profusely. It reminds me a lot of the Sussex Downs. And if you could be persuaded to shift your focus away from Palestine, then East Africa. This piece of land in East Africa is yours if you want it. Herzl felt that he had to transfer this offer to the Jewish people. And it went quite sort of catastrophically wrong. So Uganda was the first sort of seriously considered alternative to Palestine. But then this rival movement, which was led by my great grandfather and a writer, I'm sure we'll talk about Israel Zangwill, a sort of novelist turned Zionist turned anti Zionist, sort of scoured the earth and all these sort of created all these plans in places like Angola and Australia, Canada, Mexico, Paraguay. All these plans fell through quite quickly for one reason or another. You know, they were considering land in the middle of Australia and wondering, you know, it seems too good to be true, why don't people live there? And it's because it's, you know, intensely hostile to human life. You know, the Canadian government said a Jewish state in Canada is quite out of the question. You know, there was, it was just sort of doomed to failure from the beginning. But, you know, hindsight is 2020 and at the time the newspapers were saying, you know, it's quite likely that we'll see a party of Jews, you know, form a colony in, in the middle of Australia this time next year. We wish them the best of luck.
- [09:47]
A
Crazy. So when you were doing all the research and the way in which you present this material in the book is so original as well. Talk a little bit about how you presented it because it's almost like documents you would read in history class in high school or something, where you are excerpting the key points from a variety of sources and writing it almost in dialogue fashion. So we're getting multiple viewpoints, almost like, yeah, anyway, it's just super unique. Talk about telling the story this way and why you pivoted to this from how you had originally planned to write the book.
- [10:24]
B
I love that you call it dialogue fashion. That's kind of, that's exactly what I wanted. I guess all, you know, non fiction books, especially, you know, books about history, have primary sources in them. You'll have a sort of snippet from a newspaper or a letter or something, but then the author's voice will be in there as well, maybe as a character or more often as sort of glue gluing all these sources together and sort of smoothly transitioning the reader from one to the next or paraphrasing them. And I found that when I was reading history books, my favorite bits were the quotations, the bits where you're in the story with the person who was actually there, rather than some 21st century middleman. So I had this first draft which had all my interjections in it. And when I was sort of reading it back, I felt that my place in the story served no purpose. My interjections were a little bit inane. They felt a bit sort of phony almost. And I began to wonder whether I could just lead straight from one primary source or one snippet to the next. Almost as if these voices from the past were in conversation with each other and was linked to tell their side of the story. And I guess the way I made it work was not to have, you know, three lines followed by three lines followed by three lines, to maybe have one line and then a few pages and then a paragraph and then four paragraphs so that you're almost like moving between these characters and letting. Letting a different character sort of take you through the story. And I hope it kind of gives it the feel of a novel more than the feel of a history book.
- [11:54]
A
Yeah, I didn't mean to say it felt like a history book. I just meant I remember going through the primary documents, as you mentioned, to find those little gems which are what you make up. You, like, do all the work for us. But no, it tells a story. And then you include the actual words of the people in the moment as well. Not just I met Theodor Herzl, but then, like, here's the whole speech that he gave, or here's something he wrote. So no, we're getting a 360 view of history as told by you, which is great. And then explain how you link all of that and then transition in your three part structure to all the different pieces of where you lived here and how this relates to your family and everything.
- [12:35]
B
Yeah, so I was writing this or, you know, putting together this book during the pandemic, and this sort of giant, unwieldy story was swirling around my head. It was the Galveston Plan, it was Herzl and the founding of Zionism. It was my dad growing up in North London in the 40s and early 50s. And then there's also a section in the book set in the melting pot of New York in the twenties. And thirties, narrated by my grandmother's half brother's daughter. So. And, you know, I guess, you know, when I was trying to describe this book to people, and I still kind of find this. It doesn't sound like it all links together, but in my head, it was like a huge cork board with red string attached to everything. I guess, you know, the. The thing that links this whole story is assimilation, you know, is Jewish immigration, or I guess any. Any immigrants who go to a new place and find that they lose the place they came from maybe in one generation, maybe in two or three generations, they try and cling on to certain parts of their life or their sort of heritage, and. And it does sort of maybe fall away, whether you like it or not, you know, I am a product of the melting pot of London. My grandmother, you know, arrived here only speaking Russian and her head filled with Russian Jew. And as much as I want to claim the Russian Jewish identity as my own, I don't think I can because it all just within the course of two generations, it all sort of dissolved away. You know, there's a play in the book called the Melting Pot, written by Israel Zangwill in 1908, and it was. Zangwill sort of coined this term. No one really used the phrase melting pot as a metaphor for American assimilation before that. And this play sort of took the nation by storm. You know, everyone was talking about it. Theodore Roosevelt went to the opening night and was sort of, you know, led the standing ovation. And this play, the Melting Pot, is almost sort of propaganda for the idea of America as a melting pot. People from the old World arriving and casting off their old World ways and emerging from the melting pot as shiny new Americans. You know, this play is a slightly sappy sort of love story about two immigrants, you know, becoming American. And, you know, some of the critics said, can Zang will really believe that this is the answer to the, you know, the Jewish question.
- [14:57]
A
Oh, crazy. Today's episode has been sponsored by Quince. As summer winds down, I am all about refreshing my wardrobe with staple pieces for the season ahead. Quince totally nails it with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished, perfect for layering and mixing. Their styles are so versatile, I find myself reaching for them again and again. In fact, you'll see me wearing them all over my Instagram feed. Think cashmere and cotton sweaters starting at $40, washable silk tops and classic denim pants. The best part is that everything with Quince is half the cost of similar brands. By working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen. Quince gives you luxury without the markup and Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. And you'll see on Instagram. I love my quince skirt. I've been wearing it all summer and it is a fabulous fabric. It's long, the pattern's amazing and it's just amazing. Plus the price was great so I just absolutely adore it. Elevate your fall wardrobe essentials with Quince. Go to Quince.com Zibby for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U I N C E.com Zippy to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Zippy this summer Instacart is bringing back your favorites from 1999 with prices from 1999. That means 90s prices on juice pouches that ought to be respected, 90s prices on box Mac and cheese and 90s prices on ham, cheese and cracker lunches. Enjoy all those throwbacks and more at throwback prices only through Instacart. $4.72 maximum discount per $10 of eligible items. Limit one offer per order. Expires September 5 while supplies last discount based on CPI comparison. Say hello to Mia hey there. Mia runs a pet grooming service in Chicago, but getting new clients was rough until I started using acast. I recorded my ad targeted pet owners in the area and let Acast do the rest. Now people all over the city know about my grooming services. Mia's business is looking sharp. What's your secret for happy pets and happy clients? A fresh cut, a friendly vibe and a well placed podcast ad. Get the word out about your business through Acast. Visit go acast.com advertise to get started. Can you also just finish the explanation for people who might not know? And I think there are some people who are quite educated who just are not knowledgeable of this area. Your great grandfather led a whole group to Galveston, Texas. Why did Galveston, Texas not become Israel?
- [17:49]
B
The original idea was to buy one of the southern states of America from the American government and turn it into a Jewish state. Very quickly this idea was shown to be unworkable. The Americans said absolutely not. That was not going to happen. So the sort of plan B was to bring as many Jewish refugees as possible to America, but not to New York where this, this huge overwhelming stream of immigrants had been arriving at, you know, the turn of the 20th century. You know, New York was the greatest Jewish center in the world. And there were some longer established German Jews who looked down upon the Russian Jews of the Lower east side and saw that the low, or in their view the Lower east side was overflowing. And that if, if this rate of immigration continued, anti Semitism would spread like a menace across America. So the idea, these German Jews was to divert the stream of Jewish immigrants away from New York to somewhere further down the east coast of America. And they chose Galveston partly because it had, you know, seven years before been destroyed by the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history. And they thought that it was just, you know, it was slowly rebuilding and it was still just unattractive enough that the Jews wouldn't want to create, you know, a ghetto in Galveston, a sort of new Lower east side. So that's why Galveston was chosen. And also because it had railroad lines extending like the five fingers of a hand all across the sort of American interior so that an immigrant arriving in Galveston could get off the boat after a month long journey and get on a train that day to Kansas City or anywhere in the American hinterland.
- [19:39]
A
So of course, as we know, that did not work. They did end up where they ended up and Israel is where it is. But now, of course, people are contesting that it has a right to that land. How does your research inform this hot topic today?
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, I guess, you know, this book starts with the founding of Zionism and with Herzl. You know, Herzl writes in his diary in I think the late 1890s. You know, I have this idea, you know, I'm writing this pamphlet, the Jewish state of, of, you know, have this idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland of Palestine. But if nothing comes of it, at least I can turn this into a novel titled the Promised Land. Herzl really, as far as I can understand it, had no idea of this vast machine he was setting into motion. This machine that is still, the cogs are still turning today. You know, there's this phrase in the book that one of the characters said, the unresting chain of events. And you know, we think of, I think, you know, when we talk about Zionism today and Israel today, I think most people are thinking about post 1948, but I think we almost have a duty to be curious no matter how we feel about Israel, be curious about how this all started and the, how the events of 100 years ago shape our, you know, shape. Shape 2025.
- [20:58]
A
Do you get frustrated when you hear things in the news that, you know, from a deep historical Dive or not. Not accurate. How do you handle that?
- [21:07]
B
Yeah, I. I don't get frustrated, I guess. You know, I. I think when I went, before I started writing this book, I was quite ignorant about Jewish history and the history of Zionism. But, yeah, I mean, I guess, yeah, it is just useful to. To go back to the start. And I have. I mean, it's. You know, I've had people on all sides of the spectrum say that they've sort of learned something from this book. And I like the idea that it maybe just sort of. Of destabilizes you a bit, in your view, to find out what actually happened and not be sort of. I hope that this book isn't really sort of biased or doesn't really have an agenda. That it's just about presenting the past as accurately and as vividly as possible. And that maybe you go in with some very firm view, very sort of neat principle, you know, tied in a bow how you feel about things. And maybe this book, you know, my aim is to sort of pull the rug out from under the reader's feet a little bit.
- [22:00]
A
Has there ever been. And I should. I could have obviously Googled this, but I didn't. Has there ever been movies that depict this period of time in the way that you present it with all the sources and the different points of view? Because it is a. Not just stopping there, obviously, but, you know, maybe they didn't cover your grandparents, you know, ancestors. But has there been like a mainstream depiction of this backstory?
- [22:26]
B
I guess not. I mean, you know, I now, I guess, see the world through melting point tinted glasses. I sort of see traces of this story everywhere. You know, I didn't see the Brutalist, but I think that has sort of elements of, you know, Jewish immigration. And Steven Spielberg made. Made a film about his, I think, his parents who were Jewish immigrants to Kansas maybe. And I guess, yeah, the story of Jewish immigration to America in the 20th century is one that has. Has just traces and echoes in a lot of the media that we sort of consume today.
- [23:01]
A
But I want. I want there to be a film that goes back even further to really put us in the room. I mean, the way now, having seen exactly who's saying what and even how it's being reported, it just feels so cinematic to me. So anyway, I'm gonna keep searching, or maybe it's just you're doing and then that's great.
- [23:19]
B
So I was very inspired by certain films which were nothing to do with Russian Jews going to Texas. There's a film about the the moon landing, which is, in theory it's a documentary because it's formed entirely of archival footage and audio from the ground in, you know, ground control, but also, you know, on the rocket itself, where the astronauts were sort of filming things and recording, you know, transmissions back to Earth. And that that documentary could have easily had sort of talking heads and a sort of, you know, voiceover artist saying, and soon they were about to land on the moon. But it has none of that. It's just the archive stuff. And as a result, it, you know, it feels like you're there. It feels like you're watching a feature film rather than a documentary. And I guess, you know, that idea of sort of blurring the boundaries between genres was something that I was very inspired by from documentaries without voiceovers.
- [24:18]
A
So. Interesting. Have you been surprised by the success of the book?
- [24:22]
B
I have, you know, when I, you know, I've spent five years telling people that I've been writing a book formed entirely of primary sources about a little known and long forgotten movement to bring 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas. And by the time I finished saying that, you know, their eyes have glazed over, they're sort of backing off slowly. It does feel very niche both in terms of the, the form and the content. So I guess the fact that it has sort of reached people and made an impact has been a very, very happy surprise for me.
- [24:55]
A
And how do you, how do you process all the information about your own family and your own identity that you found through the process?
- [25:04]
B
I think I guess I was feeling. I went through my life feeling, I was gonna say isolated in terms of just generationally isolated. You know, I. I feel like my family has such a short term collective memory. We don't really talk about anyone further back than my grandmother. And even, you know, even my grandmother, I didn't know a huge amount about her before I started this book. And so I guess it has, you know, spending this time in the early 1900s with my great grandfather and with his contemporaries. Yet it did sort of of to connect me to my own lineage in a way, which, yeah, is something that I guess I'll have the rest of my life.
- [25:47]
A
Amazing. And where do you go from here? How do you start another giant project?
- [25:51]
B
For so long I was completely at a loss and thought I would never have an idea again and that the Juice of Texas was, you know, my only. The only thing I could ever write about. And then I realized that this form of telling a story entirely through primary sources can actually be applied to any story as long as you have such a vast mountain of archive material that you think you're never going to get through it all, that you think you're going to drown in it, that it would take several lifetimes to get through. Because what that means is that if you spend long enough sort of combing through it all, you can find the exact right sort of beat for, you know, the exact right sentence or paragraph, you know, for every moment in the story. There are no sort of holes or gaps where you have to jump in as the narrator. So I think, I guess I would like to show that this strange form of writing history can be applied to other topics as well.
- [26:47]
A
Oh, I love that. Annabel Gurwich, who contributed to the anthology I published and edited called On Being Jewish Now. Her essay was about being a Jew from Galveston, Texas, by the way.
- [26:57]
B
Wow. Oh, I've got to point that out.
- [26:59]
A
So I should put you two in touch. You should do an event. She's also hilarious, by the way. So, yeah, anyway, well, Rachel, I learned a lot. I found this so fascinating, and I'm so glad that you and I met at a book event at the 14th Street Y in New York City and you were like, I have this book and it's doing quite well. So anyway, thank you for introducing yourself and thank you for all of your time putting together a very complicated history and making it incredibly easy to consume and something that I feel is of utmost important in the conver utmost importance in the conversation today. So thanks.
- [27:33]
B
Thank you so much. Zibby.
- [27:34]
A
Thank you. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review. Follow me on Instagram ibyowens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.
- [27:57]
B
Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult.
- [28:02]
A
Life skill to teach?
- [28:03]
B
Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families with greenlight. You can set up chores, automate allowance and keep an eye on your kids spending with real time notifications. Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today@Greenlight.com podcast.
- [28:26]
A
Greetings, homeowner. Repeat after me if my home system or appliance breaks down. American Elm Shield will help fix or replace the covered item, no matter its age and exhale.
- [28:39]
B
Oh, and home warranty plans started 29.99amonth.
- [28:42]
A
American Home Shield don't worry be warranty. Visit ahs.com listen for 20% off any plan.
- [28:49]
B
See ahs.com contracts for coverage details, including limit amounts, fees, limitations and exclusions.
- [28:55]
A
Now you can fly anywhere in the world and pay discount prices on your airline tickets. Book a flight today to London, Paris, Madrid or anywhere else you want to go, and pay a lot less guaranteed. Call the International Travel Department right now at low cost airlines, 8002-1551-4180-0215-5141. That's 800-21551.