Zionism, the Melting Pot, and the Galveston Project (with Rachel Cockerell)

Rachel Cockerell: Thank you, Russ.

Rachel Cockerell: I really just wanted to write a nice, normal book. I had read quite a few sort of Jewish family memoirs like The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal and East West Street by Philippe Sands. And, I wanted to write something in that lineage. I knew that I had some Jewish ancestry, but I didn’t really know much about it. I didn’t even know how my grandmother’s surname was spelled. My grandmother was called Fannie Jochelman. I didn’t know–and when she married, she became Fannie Cockerell and sort of tried to forget about her Jewishness quite quickly. But, I was sort of fascinated by her and also by her father, David Jochelman, whose obituary I had stumbled upon in the New York Times in 1941. And it said Dr. Jochelman’s name was a household word for Jews across the Russian Empire. And I sort of thought: How strange that whatever my great-grandfather did has been totally forgotten by his own family. And, I thought maybe I would sort of try and find out.

So, I wanted to write this story of finding some old letters in a shoebox and going on a journey of discovery. But I quickly realized that this story of my family and how my family arrived in England, sort of–I kept on tracing it further back and back, all these sort of causes and causes that caused those causes.

And, I traced it back to the founding of Zionism, which seems a strange place for a story about my family in London to start. But, I realized I would have to start this story with Theodor Herzl founding Zionism in the 1890s. And I realized that I wasn’t sort of a character in this story. So, I slowly wondered if it was possible to remove myself from this story and create a non-fiction book which almost felt a bit more like a novel.

And then, I wondered how on earth I was going to do that, and then I stumbled upon a strange way of doing that.

Rachel Cockerell: So, I had this horrible first draft with the founding of Zionism and little did Theodor Herzl know what was to come, and all these sort of lines that I had put in there, which felt very obsolete. And, this story which started with Zionism and then ended with my family and the various places across the world that my family sort of scattered to. My great-grandfather had three children, one of whom went to London–my grandmother–one to New York–her brother–and one to Jerusalem–her sister. So, I had this first draft which started with the founding of Zionism, ended with my family in the mid-20th century, and my own silly little interjections. And then, I just felt instinctively that I wanted to delete my own interjections, to give the voices of those who were there more of a sort of central role, so that they became the center of it rather than me, the 21st century sort of middleman.

And, there were moments while I was sort of redrafting when two primary sources or two sort of voices from the past were juxtaposed. In my text, I had no interjection from me. It just went straight from one voice to another voice. And, I sort of loved those moments when it seemed like these dead people were in conversation with each other and I was craving more and more of that. And then, I eventually had this sort of new draft, which was almost entirely these voices with my own moments where I came in just to sort of glue it all together. And, it felt like a kind of tightrope walk that I was sometimes falling off; but I wondered: I wonder if I could sort of stay on this tightrope walk all the way through. So, eventually I managed to create a whole book with o interjections from me, only primary sources or only these sort of long dead voices talking to each other and telling the story through their own perspectives.

Rachel Cockerell: That’s right.

Rachel Cockerell: I mean, for all my life, I’ve been famously the most disorganized person that anyone’s ever met. And, at school, I think I was sort of the last generation who didn’t have a particularly digital education. So there were no sort of laptops or iPads or anything. And, at school, my life was just a chaos of papers–important papers just sort of floating out of my hands and slipping away and disappearing forever. It was just–I would lose everything and everything would be in a crazy order. I did during GCSEs [General Certificate of Secondary Education], this thing in England where you’re doing sort of 11 subjects when you’re 15 and 16, all my GCSE subject files were all sort of mixed together. So, I’m very lucky to have been writing this book in the age of laptops. So, it was all, I mean, it was still pretty chaotic, but I had these sort of endlessly long sort of Google Docs of notes and it would be a 250-page document of notes online.

And then, when it got to about 250, I would start a new document of notes. And then, I think I had about 10 of these 250 page notes documents in the end. And, within that, it was all quite chaotic, but I could always do, ‘edit, find on this page,’ and find the exact quote I wanted.

So, it was sort of an organized chaos. But in my head it was all sort of coming together. I mean, they say about any sort of creative project that your subconscious is sort of churning through it and the human mind is always looking for patterns and sort of dwelling on patterns and trying to form patterns.

So, this story, which I suppose objectively is quite incoherent–a story of early Zionism and New York in the 1920s and post-war London and Jerusalem in 1951 and people who were related to me and weren’t related to me–it seems like none of it really fits together. But my mind was all my sort of waking thoughts were: How do I make sense of this story? What is the narrative art? And: How am I going to make this into something coherent?

Rachel Cockerell: Oh, thank you. I mean, that was really my ultimate goal, to make it as close to a time machine as possible. And, the joy of reading newspapers from 1900, 1896, 1910, as you said, people wrote differently, but not so differently that a 21st-century reader feels lost or feels like it’s from a different era or feels like something has been lost in translation. It’s sort of that sweet spot, the turn of the century, where they’re writing in a modern way, in a way that they weren’t writing in 1850, but still beautifully and so free of cliché, all these sort of–the turn of phrase was so wonderful. I kept on just coming across these just delightful little phrases that have fallen out of use now, but it was so joyful to read all this stuff.

I mean, the first Zionist Congress in particular–I suppose the first few Zionist Congresses–there were a huge number of journalists from all around the world, but especially American and English journalists who had been sent there by their local paper–you know, the Sunderland Daily Echo or the Louisville Courier. I guess the golden age of journalism, if you were a correspondent for some very sort of provincial little newspaper, you might go to Switzerland in 1898 and go to this strange thing called the Zionist Congress. And, they would say things like, ‘For many of our readers, this word Zionism will be either unfamiliar or a very new term that’s been bandied about in the press. And, this word may not mean anything to most of you, but believe us when we say this is the most spectacular event of the century.’

So, I spent a lot of time immersed in these old newspapers. I would use old newspaper archives online, and it was during the pandemic, and I felt like the early Zionist Congresses were more real to me than the 2020 lockdown.

Rachel Cockerell: I mean, I think, so for example, I would find some long article which was a sort of pen-portrait of Herzl or of one of the first Zionist Congresses or of things that happen later in the book. And, I think I’m lucky because I had this strong instinct as I read something: certain lines just seemed to leap out at me. And, I think any creative person in any field, you know when you’ve sort of found your correct field when you have very strong opinions about something. The writer, George Saunders, says that he loves writing and he loves making music, but when he’s sort of strumming on his guitar, he doesn’t really know whether one chord is better than another. Whereas when he looks at a paragraph, he knows that that comma has to be removed and so on. So, yeah, I found that I was having these strong opinions as I was reading.

And then, even when I had sort of in theory finished the book, I was still going back and making cuts over and over again. And, I find the cutting process to be very satisfying.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s interesting because even Herzl, when he first–he wrote this little book as he called it, which was–other people called it a pamphlet; it was a very slim volume–called The Jewish State. And, even in that book that his sort of first founding of modern Zionism, he suggested that there could be other possible Jewish refuges. It wasn’t sort of Palestine or nothing. He suggested a few places in South America. I think Argentina was mentioned. For him, it wasn’t sort an all-or-nothing thing.

Then Herzl approached the British government at the very start of the 20th century and asked them for help.

And the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain–the father of Neville Chamberlain; Joseph was much more, was hugely famous in his day and would be sort of a bit shocked that his son would have become the Chamberlain that people think of. Joseph Chamberlain was quite charmed by this foreign, quite handsome, sort of statesman-like man from Vienna and said to him, ‘I’ve seen a land for you on my travels, Dr. Herzl, and that’s Uganda. It reminds me very much of the Sussex Downs in England. If you want it, it’s yours.’ ‘English roses bloom profusely,’ he wrote in his diary. And, Herzl wrote in his own diary that it didn’t seem right. He thought, surely this is not the answer to the Jewish question. But he felt like he had no choice but to relay this offer of the British government to the Jewish people.

So, at the next Zionist Congress, he made a speech and said, ‘We’ve had our first ever offer of land. Do we want it?’ And, the Zionist Congress sort of went into a frenzy. Some people were excited about this so-called Uganda Plan and others were horrified that Herzl, who was meant to be leading the Jews back to the ancient homeland of Palestine, seemed to be going on a detour.

And this all sort of ended in catastrophe, which I won’t give away. But, it meant that Zionism split into the Ugandists–as they were called–and the sort of pure Zionists, the sort of Zion-Zionists. And, this was sort of the first crack in the Zionist movement, which had until then been quite sort of unified in these Jews all across the world coming together to create a plan to return to Palestine. This was the first schism.

My great-grandfather was actually one of the Ugandists, and the Ugandists were horrified when eventually the Zionists voted to reject the British offer of land in East Africa. And, this group ended up rebelling from the Zionist movement. They stormed out and they said, ‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.’ And, as you mentioned–

Rachel Cockerell: I agree. Yeah. It’s–

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was a great slogan. And if only they had–they chose a name for themselves, which the name Zionist is quite sort of pithy, it’s a good name. And, this rebel group chose for themselves the awful name of the Jewish Territorial Organization. Which for some strange reason, they didn’t even shorten to JTO–which is bad enough–but they shortened to ITO. So, I mean, if only they had the same marketer for their slogan as they did for their name. But, the ITO led by, as you mentioned, Israel Zangwill, who was one of the most famous Jewish writers in the world at the turn of the 20th century. He was known as the Jewish Dickens. And he sort of abandoned his career as a writer–

Rachel Cockerell: He was British, yeah, a British Jewish novelist and playwright. And, he sort of put his writing to one side for the sake of the Jewish cause. And he came up with this amazing line, ‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.’

And this organization sort of scoured the globe for a temporary Jewish refuge, somewhere where the Jews could sort of gather and be safe. He said quite sort of haunting things like, ‘Who knows,’ this was in sort of 1906, ‘who knows what the worldly gig of time has in store for us? Are we to just stand by and wring our hands as,–‘ you know. It was all these sort of lines which seemed to be sort of foreshadowing what was to come for the Jews in the 20th century. It was this sort of desperation: We’ve got to find somewhere before it’s too late.

Rachel Cockerell: Thank you so much. I really wanted to bring him back. I must admit that–you know, you mentioned the word ‘immortal’. I don’t think Zangwill’s writing is immortal. I am one of the world’s greatest Zangwill fans now, having spent three years researching him, and even I find his novels slightly awful.

But, as you said, he was hugely famous. I need to find a new superlative rather than saying he was the most famous Jewish writer in the world, because he was more than that. He was really a Victorian celebrity. Whether he was walking down Fleet Street in London or Madison Avenue in New York, there would be sort of throngs of people around him wanting to shake his hand and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Zangwill, I love your novel so much.’ And as you said, he wrote this play, The Melting Pot, in 1908, and it was the first–the reason we use that phrase today is because of Zangwill.

So, people will say to me that they don’t know who he is, and yet I’ll hear this phrase almost every day. People–whether I’m sort of overhearing a conversation or listening to a podcast–this phrase, ‘the melting pot,’ which is such a perfect phrase to describe the sort of American project of immigrants arriving and assimilating, melting into the melting pot and emerging as shiny new Americans. In 1907, they didn’t have a way to talk about that. They didn’t have a metaphor for it. And then, suddenly in 1908, they did.

The premiere–as you said–Roosevelt was in the audience and applauded wildly. Roosevelt had said things in the past like, ‘An American should revere only one flag, the American flag. No other flag should even come second.’ So, Roosevelt was very pro-assimilation. And, here was Zangwill presenting this play, which was almost sort of propaganda for the idea of the great American melting pot.

So, yeah, Zangwill was hugely famous. And, actually the play, The Melting Pot, was inspired by his work, the Jewish Territorial Organization, which ended up finding that if they could not get the Holy Land, maybe America should be the Holy Land.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. So, New York in 1900–

Rachel Cockerell: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The Melting Pot, the play, was actually made into a silent film in I think 1915, and it’s one of the few lost silent films. We have these reviews of it and we have adverts for it, but the can of film has disappeared forever–which feels like some sort of metaphor.

The play The Melting Pot is about two immigrants who come to America, one Russian Jewish, one Russian non-Jewish, and fall in love, but realize they’re so different and how could they ever live happily ever after? But then they decide to cast their differences aside and melt into the melting pot. And, the main character, who is called David, who–my great-grandfather is also called David, and I like to think that he is named after my great-grandfather, but I will never know for sure–David makes all these sort of grand speeches: ‘Jews, Christians, French, Italian, Irishmen,’ I used to have it memorized, ‘all of you come here and melt into God’s crucible. God is making the American.’ Yeah, he makes all these grand speeches.

And this girl, the Russian Christian girl, has to listen to all these speeches. And then, they do fall in love and live happily ever after. And, when this play was premiered in DC [Washington, D.C.], the audience was all standing ovations. They were all sort of going wild for it. And then, this play sort of went on tour across America.

Rachel Cockerell: Oh yeah. Well, so the Kishinev Pogrom happened in 1903. And the reason that the main character is in New York is because he’s fleeing from the Kishinev Pogrom. And, his girlfriend’s dad was involved in the Kishinev Pogrom on the Russian Christian side.

And, actually this pogrom, it’s quite interesting because when it happened–in theory, it was this small event in a far-away town of which we know so little. It happened in what is now Moldova. And, Americans today–someone in America recently asked me if I was from France. So, Americans don’t have that much of a sense of what goes on across the pond. And, for Americans, in 1910, it seemed like how is it that they cared so much? And, yet when the Kishinev Pogrom happened, there were protests all across America. Several former presidents spoke about it, including Grover Cleveland. Theodore Roosevelt said, ‘Nothing is sort of more–this is foremost in my mind.’ He seemed to be thinking about it every day.

So, for some reason, it captured the American attention and created a huge sense of outrage and sympathy for Russian Jews who were being massacred by Russian Christians. So yeah: I suppose Zangwill was sort of playing on the fact that he knew the pogrom was something that was important to Americans. And so, people said it was very heart-rending and then funny, and just this play was totally gripping.

The New York Times was one of the few places which was very rude about the play. They said, ‘Zangwill’s new play, cheap and tawdry, sentimental trash masquerading as human drama.’

So, I mean, I was reading all these reviews, some of which said, ‘Zangwill has written the great American play,’ and others said, ‘This is a load of rubbish.’ And the fun of sort of juxtaposing all of those and creating a sort of debate, that was the real highlight for me.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. This is the longest that I’ve–

Rachel Cockerell: I say Jochelman.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. And, in fact, I’m amazed that we’ve got this far in the conversation without talking about it, because usually it’s the sort of first thing I mention: which is that my great-grandfather’s job in the early 20th century was helping 10,000 Jews escape Russia and flee to Texas. It was called the Galveston Project. And this was–as I said earlier, Zangwill and Jochelman had been searching for an alternative to the Holy Land. And, the American Jews sort of caught wind of this and said, ‘We hear you’re looking for somewhere for the Russian Jews to go. Bring them to America; but just not to New York. Let’s find somewhere else for them.’

So, I sort of imagine them with a big map of the United States, sort of looking down the coastal cities and landing on Galveston and thinking, ‘Okay, perfect. Let’s bring them to Galveston.’ And, from Galveston, they can sort of spread out across, as they call it, the American hinterland.

So, Galveston became the alternative promised land. And, this was what my great-grandfather was doing from 1907 to 1914. He was apparently going around the Russian Empire, finding Jews who were about to set off for New York and saying, ‘Why don’t you go to Galveston, Texas instead?’ And, they said, ‘Galveston? But I want to go to America.’ Because for them, New York and America were synonyms. They both were a small town on the edge of the New World.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, so this was–when I was first wanting to write this book, I wanted to write about my grandmother, Fanny Jochelman. And then, her father, whose obituary I read in the New York Times–I was asking my family, who is this guy and why did he have an obituary in the New York Times? And, none of them could tell me. Everyone thought he was quite a sort of boring man involved in stocks and shares somehow. And, it was really when I started reading all these books that said Dr. Jochelman was instrumental in the Galveston movement that I realized maybe there was–I had never heard the word Galveston, but I realized maybe there was something here.

Rachel Cockerell: The people who were organizing the Galveston plan, Zangwill included, envisioned that two million Russian Jews would enter America through Galveston. It was to become the new Ellis Island. And, the idea was that any Jew in Russia who thought of migrating to America would instantly think of Galveston rather than thinking of New York as the sort of obvious place to go.

This did not happen. They only got 10,000 there in seven years. So, for them, it seemed like a huge disappointment and a huge failure. And, it ended for several reasons, one of which was that the immigration rules seemed to be stricter at Galveston. So, if you had an eye infection or if you were too old or if you didn’t have any money, then you might be sort of thrown back to Russia. Whereas in New York, it seemed like it was a safer bet that you would get into America.

And then also, World War I broke out, which sort of halted all transatlantic passenger traffic. And, there were a few other factors which meant that the Galveston movement was shut down in 1914. And, my great-grandfather was–he actually went to London to be with Zangwill and sort of wrap it all up and make sure it all ended smoothly. But, the whole thing was so stressful to him that he–I think he had not a heart attack, but some sort of–he had a bit of a sort of nervous breakdown because of the Galveston movement.

Rachel Cockerell: I mean, this is sort of the sad, or at least sort of bittersweet, aspect of the Galveston movement. Obviously, all these Jews were saved from their fate in the Russian Empire, but the whole idea was for them not to congregate in one place.

So, if you imagine 10,000 Jews staying in Galveston, that was not a particularly enticing idea for the Americans who were sort of organizing this. They didn’t want to change the shape of a certain city. So, instead, the Jews arriving in Galveston were told to get on a train that day–the day they arrived or the next day. And, if you think of it, they had just spent a month crossing the Atlantic, and their journey was sort of not over yet–to somewhere, either somewhere in Texas, so a lot in Dallas and Houston and Austin, or small towns in Texas, and also further afield. So, I think in the end, there were Galveston immigrants in every state west of the Mississippi and some east as well.

So, they really spread out, which meant that maybe they were the only Jewish family in South Bend or wherever they went. And, that meant that they did melt into the melting pot a lot quicker than a Jew arriving on the Lower East Side of New York, where they would be surrounded by people speaking Yiddish and Russian and Polish, and they would be able to keep kosher and keep Sabbath and sort of cling onto their Jewish rituals and traditions for maybe a generation or two longer than a Jew arriving in Kansas City.

Rachel Cockerell: Well, he’s around the Russian Empire, but he’s mostly in Kiev.

Rachel Cockerell: Right. Correct.

Rachel Cockerell: So, I never knew that my grandmother, Granny Fanny, had a half-brother who was called Emmanuel Jochelman, and he was born in 1898, and, when he was a teenager was sent to New York. Which is strange because this was just when my great-grandfather was saying that all Russian Jews should not go to New York–should go to Texas instead. So, during the Galveston movement, my great-half uncle was sent to New York, and Emmanuel Jochelman decided that his name was too polysyllabic to carry around without tripping. And, he changed his name to Emjo Basshe–slightly unspellable and unpronounceable–and he became an experimental playwright in New York. He moved in the same circles as Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and formed this theater company.

And, in 1930, he married an actress who was in one of his plays, a Southern belle called Doris Elisa Troutman. And, together they had a daughter. And Doris said, ‘Shall we name her Jane?’ And, Emjo Basshe said, ‘I have a better idea. Let’s name her Emjo Basshe II.’ So, Emjo Basshe II was born in 1930 and is now in her 90s and living in Canada.

And, this book sort of moves from London and Basel to New York, I guess to the melting pot. And, I really wanted–the first part of the book is sort of Zangwill theorizing about the melting pot. He’s not an American. It seems like he’s sort of coming up with all these ideas from the outside. And, I wanted the reader to be immersed in the melting pot and see what it was really like.

So, Emjo Basshe II’s upbringing is sort of very typical of–it’s just typically American. She’s half Russian Jewish and half North Carolinian, if that’s the word.

Rachel Cockerell: And, she grows up with this sort of hybrid of two identities within her, seemingly sort of in conflict or sort of fighting to be the sort of dominant one. And to this day–she’s in her 90s now–and I feel like she still doesn’t know whether she’s a Southern belle or a Russian Jew.

So, yeah, the second part of the book is about Emjo Basshe and Emjo Basshe II.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. I suppose they were sort of before their time. They were called The New Playwrights Theater, and they were founded in the 1920s. And, they were putting on these pretty weird, sort of experimental plays, which–the main character of one of Emjo’s plays, at one point stands on the Brooklyn Bridge and contemplates suicide. And a reviewer called Alexander Woollcott, who was very famous in his time, said that the main character ‘suffered almost as much as his audience.’ Which gives you a sense of the kind of delightfully scathing things that these reviewers were saying about these plays.

But, I guess that part of the story is in there because Emjo wrote a play called The Centuries, which was about Jews arriving in New York. And, it was sort of a play about disillusionment and the promised land of America maybe not living up to its promises. Yeah.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. Yeah. And, I think Zangwill had been putting such a shine on it and really had known very little about the reality of being a Jewish immigrant in New York.

Rachel Cockerell: Yeah. And people said that about Zangwill’s play: that it seemed overly just shiny and lovely and sort of wonderful.

And, Emjo, he wrote a very different play. It seemed, yes–a reviewer said it seemed to be sort of clawed out of his own experiences.

And this theater company, quickly died a swift death. But, during their time, they had been funded by Otto Kahn, who was a very wealthy German Jewish banker in New York, who still–he has this huge estate just outside of New York, which–he was just hugely wealthy. And, he was the patron of people like George Gershwin and others. He was sort of living vicariously through these New York artists and musicians and writers because he had wanted to be one himself, but his father said, ‘You have to become a banker.’

Rachel Cockerell: She was fantastic. I mean, I keep saying this over and over again, but she was another person who I had forgotten, my family had forgotten. I was telling my dad, ‘Did you know that your mother had this half-brother called Emjo Basshe?’ And, he said to me, ‘Oh, I know Emjo Basshe, but she was my age and she wasn’t my mother’s brother.’ And, for a while, this mystery of the two Emjo Basshes sort of flummoxed us both.

I mean, families are very strange, aren’t they?

But, Emjo Basshe the Second, she was the typical sort of long-lost relative. And I called her up one day in January 2020, and it seemed like she had been waiting 90 years for my call. And, she just started telling me about life in New York in the 1930s, her memories of her father, of her grandfather–my great-grandfather–David Jochelman.

And, all these stories came out of her, but not in the way that some relatives tell you stories that are long-winded and sort of going on all these sort of tangents and grammatically incorrect. She had been an English teacher; and as a result, these perfectly-formed sentences came out of her mouth, which I transcribed and sort of put straight in the book because they were just so wonderful. And she had all these sort of catchphrases.

I talked to her for an hour every Sunday for a year or two, and it seemed like there was just no end to the amount that she could tell me. And, I kept on thinking of more and more questions for her. She remembered FDR’s [Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s] Fireside Chats. She remembered the day that Pearl Harbor was bombed. She remembered Hitler’s invasion of Europe, almost sort of day by day. And I guess this is one of the themes in the book of how every family is sort of intertwined with history: that you can’t isolate a person from the events that they’re living through.

Rachel Cockerell: She has.

Rachel Cockerell: Well, she’s read it a few times. She first read it when it was just a manuscript, and she didn’t really understand the thing of having all primary sources. So, she said she liked it, but it was just notes, and she wondered when I would write a real book.

But then, I think when I sent her the six-page New Yorker review, that was when she sort of paid a bit of attention. And, now I think she partly loves it because it has so much of her father in it, and she feels like it’s sort of a piece of him that she has left.

Rachel Cockerell: Partly because I felt that Zangwill had already taken the title of The Melting Pot. And, although there is no copyright on titles, I didn’t really want to plagiarize that from him. I felt that that belonged to him.

Nevertheless, people do just–I tell people the title of my book, Melting Point, and they look me straight in the eye and repeat back to me, ‘Oh, Melting Pot, great title.’ All my emails are: Re: Your book, ‘The Melting Pot.’

I guess I called it Melting Point because I felt like this book is about assimilation and is there a moment when someone assimilates? For my grandmother, she began life as a Russian Jew and ended life as an Englishwoman. People in my family said she was more English than the English. And, I wondered when was the moment when she became English instead of Russian Jewish? And I suppose there isn’t really one, but that was what was sort of playing on my mind. [More to come, 52:23]