The Galveston Plan, in their words
Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, by Rachel Cockerell, reviewed by Ann S. Epstein
If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.
(Israel Zangwill, 1906)
So begins Melting Point, Rachel Cockerell’s account of the search for a Jewish homeland. The story is a family saga; her great-grandfather, David Jochelman, was instrumental in bringing 10,000 Russian Jews to Galveston, Texas, pre-WWI, when Palestine was unattainable. The family tale also illuminates an era of Jewish history, a story likely to surprise readers as much as it did Cockerell herself. Today, when asked “Are you a Zionist?” many of us are uncertain of the term’s meaning, let alone its origins and evolution. Melting Point is therefore a timely book. Knowing the past allows us to better assess the State of Israel and worldwide Jewry now and in the future.
The Galveston Plan was one site in the search for a refuge where Jews could escape Russian and Eastern European pogroms and poverty. Improbably, other proposed destinations included East Africa, West Africa, Madagascar, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, Australia, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and Antarctica. The initiative grew out of the early Zionist movement, founded by Theodor Herzl, a charismatic Viennese journalist, abetted by Israel Zangwill, an early follower. Largely unknown today, Zangwill, a novelist, was then the English-speaking world’s most famous Jew.
[Herzl is] tall, handsome, black-bearded, clear-eyed, erect in bearing, suave in manner, like kings ought to look.
(Cyrus Sulzberger, American philanthropist]
[Zangwill is] the very archetype of his race, spare of form and bent of shoulder, whose face suggests one of those sculptured gargoyles in a mediaeval cathedral.
(The New York Herald)
Zangwill also played a significant role in Cockerell’s family, unbeknownst to younger generations. Says the author, “At some point the story of the Galveston Plan, and my great-grandfather’s role in it, was lost. Perhaps David Jochelman told his daughters about his work in Russia, or perhaps, as a new arrival in England in the 1910s and ’20s, his pre-war existence belonged to a lost world.”
Cockerell, who set out to write about her grandmother and great aunt, sought a way to insert historical notes into the family tale. Emulating George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, “I gradually began to delete more and more of my own ‘voice-over’ … to tell the story through the eyes of those who were there, and create something more like a novel than a history.” As such, Melting Point consists entirely of memories — diaries, letters, news clippings, essays — assembled without commentary. The unusual format works — disparate sources “dialogue” with one another — although there are too many. Cockerell or an editor could have “killed her darlings.” That said, don’t skip sections. Skim instead, then read the full entries that speak to you.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One: Vienna, Basel, Galveston; Part Two: New York; and Part Three: London. My review highlights Part One and the end of Part Three. The rest of the book, while of interest to the family, dilutes the universal impact and would be better served in a separate volume. The book’s final pages address post-WWII Zionism, where the reactions of David Jochelman’s descendants are illustrative. Oddly, Jochelman himself is mostly absent from the book. Still, his exploits and the resumption of the urge to return to Zion are worth reading.
For some time past, I have been occupied with a work of infinite grandeur. It has the appearance of a dream. And if my conception is not translated into reality, at least out of my activity can come a novel. Title: The Promised Land.
(Theodor Herzl)
Dr. Herzl takes a dark view: Anti-Semitism changes its dress but not its essence. There is no possible escape, unless Jews remove themselves.
(Jewish Chronicle)
Herzl’s dream receives a strong response, “not from the comfortable bourgeois Jews of the West but from the masses of the East, the Galicians, Polish, and Russians of the ghetto” (Stefan Zweig, Austrian author). In July 1897, the first Universal Congress of Zionists takes place in Basel.
No hero ever received a greater ovation than did Dr. Herzl.
(American Hebrew)
Israel Zangwill, who had been sitting silently at the reporters’ table, sprang up, his face aflame with enthusiasm, cheering, waving his kerchief with energy.
(Pall Mall Gazette)
The movement gains steam after a brutal Easter attack on the Jews of Kishinev, Russia, in 1903. Herzl, acknowledging Palestine isn’t open, proposes “planting Jews on a soil of their own” elsewhere. But when he advises them to accept Chamberlain’s offer of Uganda, Zionists revolt. When the map of Palestine was covered by a map of Uganda, the delegates felt as though they were watching a total eclipse of the sun.
(Delegate Shmarya Levin)
Herzl resumes his focus on Palestine until, plagued by a weak heart, he dies at age 44. Zangwill takes over as leader, but as the Holy Land remains distant, he too pushes for alternatives. At the seventh Congress, the movement splits and Zangwill and his followers form a new movement, ITO, which stands for Jewish Territorial Organization. The idea originates with David Jochelman.
Throughout his career, Dr. Jochelman was a stormy petrel, demanding and organizing a bolder Jewish stand than that of the more cautious leaders of Anglo-Jewry.
(Jewish Chronicle)
The restriction as to Palestine is formally abolished. The whole world is within the purview of the new organization. The movement is ‘Zionism without Zion.’
(Jewish Chronicle)
Cockerell captures the hype as each new territory is offered and ensuing dejection as each proves inhospitable and uninhabitable. The litany could be a comedy sketch, were it not a heartbreaking reminder of the low regard in which Jews are held by the international community.
The promised land of the Jew is America.
(Jacob Schiff, German-American Banker)
When noted political and religious figures seek to redirect the flow of immigrants from New York’s Lower East Side to other sites in the U.S., Schiff convinces Zangwill to choose a Gulf port. In 1906, Zangwill proclaims Dr. Jochelman the Russian Director of the newly created Emigration Regulation Department. Jochelman arranges to transport 10,000 Jews to Galveston; upon arrival, they are dispersed throughout the Southwest and Midwest. Alas, the project grinds to a halt when German submarines make the 6,000-mile journey even more treacherous. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see the model’s deeper problems, and the “point” of the book’s title:
No people in history has ever been able to live unmelted in the bosom of a bigger people, except when safeguarded by a separate religion. And the religion of American Jewry is not strong and separate enough to save the American Jews from absorption. The salvation of the Jews cannot be achieved without a territory for the Jews.
(Zangwill)
The project’s end also redirects Dr. Jochelman. After a brief visit to Galveston, accompanied by the son from his first marriage, he returns to London. In Part Two, his son settles in New York, achieving modest success as a playwright under the name Emjo Basshe. Part Three, in London, covers the lead-up to WWII and its aftermath, a history so thoroughly reported elsewhere that I recommend skimming, save for when the post-war desire for a sovereign homeland is renewed.
Is it fair to expect them to rebuild their shattered lives among the tombstones of their fellows?
(Baron Thomas Horder, British physician and member of Parliament)
The principal difficulty is that Palestine is already the homeland of another people.
(Neville Barbour, BBC journalist)
The book meanders until we finally meet Jochelman’s daughters from his second marriage: Fanny, Cockerell’s grandmother, and Sonia, her great aunt. The sisters and their families, assimilated Londoners, share a big house. The arrangement holds until Israel is created in 1948. Sonia emigrates to the Jewish homeland; Fanny stays behind. Neither side gets over the loss, a poignant ending that foretells the divisions in generations to come, including ours. An Afterword, in Cockerell’s own voice, adds that Sonia’s husband grows disillusioned with Israel and only one of her four children settles there. Israel is the “fork in the road” that drives them apart.
Melting Point is one family’s intercontinental and centuries-spanning story. It is also a Jewish diaspora tale of hope and futility, historical reality and present-day reckoning. Cockerell offers no voice-over narration to interpret or answer the questions the book raises. Records from those decades, and those we compose today, will have to speak for themselves.
Ann S. Epstein is the author of eight novels, several of which portray Jewish families during WWI and WWII. Her latest book is Who Cares? Her website is https://www.asewovenwords.
