Melting Point

In the early 1900s, 10,000 persecuted Jews left Europe to forge a new life. They went not to Israel, as so often dreamed, but to Texas, USA. Using a unique blend of diaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers and interviews, 'Melting Point' is the story of Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who was instrumental in the Texas movement, and the scattered lives of his three children: one of whom went to New York, one to London, and one to Jerusalem. The book opens at the dawn of the twentieth century, with the charismatic Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl trying and failing to found a Jewish state. Against a backdrop of increasingly violent, antisemitic pogroms in Czarist Russia and overcrowding in New York, numerous options for a new Jewish homeland from Uganda to Australia were mooted but only one, Galveston in Texas, was attempted.