When author Rachel Cockerell started a nonfiction book project about her late Jewish grandmother in the UK, the last thing she suspected her research would turn up was a long-forgotten great-grandfather’s involvement in an obscure early 20th-century initiative to bring refugee Jews to Galveston, Texas.
Cockerell leaned into the unexpected twist, producing her daring new book, “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land.” Released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this spring, it has received multiple critical accolades, including from the Sunday Times and The New York Times. In an unconventional approach, the narrative is told not through an authorial voice but in the words and interspersed stories of the people themselves.
“I think it dawned on me that I was not a character in the book,” Cockerell said in a phone interview with The Times of Israel. “I was not there when the first Galveston immigrants arrived in Texas. I was not there in my family house [in London] after World War II … I began to wonder what my voice was doing in the story.”
