Astonishing story about the Jews’ search for Zion
RACHEL COCKERELL’S enthralling debut book is stitched from a vast collection of primary sources, including letters, diaries and news reports (many of them from this paper). It feels impossible she could have told her astonishing story any other way. The book, its title inspired by Israel Zangwill’s seminal play, is ostensibly about the Galveston Plan, of which the author’s great-grandfather David Jochelman was a prime driver. The plan was a mission by the Jewish Territorial Organisation for Jews fleeing pogroms to settle in the American southwest.
The first third is electric. Not just
Galveston, but the contemporaneous accounts of the annual Zionist congresses, narrated by Herzl and a breathless media. The rundown of how delegates split over plans to create a Jewish state in Uganda – a vote that indisputably changed the course of history – offers a ringside seat. You wonder, endlessly, what if ? What might have been?
It sags somewhat in the second act, which follows Jochelman’s son as he becomes an enfant terrible of the 1920s New York theatre scene. Not because it’s not interesting, but it’s so much less momentous than what precedes it and Jewish assimilation is much more well-worn territory. Given his father’s efforts, it feels poignant that EmJo, as he becomes, throws off his Judaism so easily.
The action picks up again in a final act, when Cockerell explores what her London ancestors did as war again loomed. At one point, a relative is dispatched by revisionist Zionist leader Jabotinsky to go on a warning tour of Poland. It can’t happen here, locals say. “You do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spew out its flames of extermination,” comments Jabotinsky, with agonising prescience. Still engaging are digressions on Cockerell’s grandmother and great aunt, sharing a West Hampstead home; the former making her family more English than the English, the latter heading to Israel.
It’s an odd book, flitting from events of historical significance to anecdotes about domestic chaos. Told through other people’s words, Cockerell, 29, is inevitably removed from the story and we learn nothing of her perspective. Some elements seem to come with an agenda – a section ruminating on the founding of Israel as a historic injustice, with no reference to the
UN partition plan. And its focus on those who assimilated overlooks the many Jews who did not melt into wider society, as Zangwill anticipated.
Still, I can scarcely think of a book I’ve read in years that will stay with me as this has, and from which I learnt so much. It is endlessly quotable, brimming with prophetic lines that you can’t quite believe were written when they were. Given recent events, it’s impossible not to read it and wonder about roads not taken in the search for a Jewish homeland.
As Zangwill writes in 1913, “were a territory acquired for Jewish colonisation, the Jewish problem would not indeed be ‘solved’ but every year and every century would see it getting nearer”. How wrong he was.