Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

Rachel Cockerell

704 ratings by Goodreads

Language: English

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

0374609268 / 9780374609269

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Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books (was SecondSale)

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One of The Washington Post's Top 10 Books of the Year A New Yorker Essential Read Long-listed for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction "Melting Point is one of the most original, enjoyable, and profound books I've ever read. It is a great work of art." --JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas. On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews set sail for a promised land: not Jerusalem or New York, as many on board had dreamed, but Texas. This was the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten episode in US history in which ten thousand Jews fled the persecution and brutality of the Russian Empire for the Gulf Coast. In the wake of a dramatic split in the early Zionist movement, a group of rebels impatient for an alternative to Palestine formed a rival organization. Their motto: "If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy." Led in their search for a temporary homeland by the renowned novelist Israel Zangwill and by Rachel Cockerell's great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, they scoured the Earth before reluctantly settling on Galveston. Zangwill feared the Jewish identity would be lost in the great American melting pot, but he saw no other hope. In Melting Point, Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews in a highly inventive style. Constructed entirely of primary sources, with one flowing into the next, the book lets long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell their stories with a novelistic vividness and detail. We follow Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars and to London, New York, and Jerusalem as their lives intertwine with those of memorable figures of the twentieth century--Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, and more. Melting Point asks what it means to belong, what can be salvaged from the obscured past, and whether a promised land can ever live up to its promises.…

Seller Inventory # 00107960336

Title
Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
Author
Rachel Cockerell
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication year
2025
Condition
Good
Binding
Hardback
Language
English
ISBN 10
0374609268
ISBN 13
9780374609269

World of Books (was SecondSale)

Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

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AbeBooks seller since December 20, 2007

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Founded in 2002, World of Books is a leading online destination for buying and selling both preloved and new books, committed to making sustainable reading accessible to all. With a mission to help people read more and waste less, World of Books offers a huge range of affordable, high-quality books — giving both new and preloved titles a second life. The company also operates World of Books – Sell Your Books, an easy-to-use platform that allows customers to trade in unwanted books for cash, helping to keep books in circulation while promoting sustainability. As a Certified B Corp, World of Books is driven by a vision to become the world’s largest and most sustainable dedicated online bookstore. The company measures its success through the positive environmental impact it creates, the value it provides to customers, and its ability to operate profitably while supporting its sustainable mission …

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Montgomery, IL U.S.A. 60538