205. Rachel Cockerell

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0:41Well-behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do. I thought Rachel Cockrell was mad when she told me she was writing a book about her great-grandfather who led a group of Zionists to Texas over a century ago. But her voice as author wouldn't be in it at all. It would all be quotes and primary sources. Melting Point turned out to be the most celebrated book of the last couple of years. And Rachel Cockrell has been hailed as creating a new form of fiction. It's also, in my view, an essential book for our times. Welcome to Difficult Women.

1:34Rachel Cockrell is an enfant terrible, a writer and a historian, whose first book was a surprising succès fou, Melting Point, Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land. I say surprising, Rachel, because it's about the Galveston movement, a long-forgotten and unlikely proto-Zionist dream that brought 10 ,000 Russian Jews who were escaping the time-honoured pogroms and persecutions to Texas between the years of 1907 and 1914. Anyway, we will spend a long time talking about the book, but just a bit more on you. I'm describing you as a young London gunslinger and raving beauty. You're the sixth out of seven children of Michael Cockrell and your mother, Anna Lloyd, a BBC journalist.

2:24You did your BA at the Courtauld Institute and your MA at City University. And you're currently a McDowell Fellow, which you're going to tell me about, which is an artist residency fellowship, I'm not sure where, that supports people like you, creative professionals. Welcome to Difficult Women, Rachel. Thank you so much, Rachel. Shall we tell them? Yes, I think we ought to get it off our chests. Go ahead. No, you tell them. Oh, I tell them. Oh, well, this is not the first time me and Rachel have met. In fact, I think I have known you my entire life. Rachel is my godmother, my favourite godmother.

3:01I'm very proud to be your godmother, Rachel. And I like to tell people that you were named after me. On the book, which is, I think, the thing we should focus on in this conversation, although being one of seven children, you know, the daughter of journalists is also very interesting. And also your own Jewish antecedents that come out in the book. you sent me a chunk of this book before october the 7th before the the the plight of the jews and anti-semitism and anti-zionism became a non-stop talking point and i remember reading the book reading that chunk and replying and i'm very ashamed of what i said to you because i said i didn't like the format and it is the very format of your book that has absolutely entranced readers you know in many jurisdictions and languages and you have had the most incredible reviews for your first book so over to you Rachel tell everyone in your words what the book is and also how you came to write it and then the format you chose.

4:07Okay I'll try and remember all of those and I'll probably forget 99 % of your questions. I mean when I tell people what my book is about and the format, I sort of see their heart sink. I see their eyes glaze over. And my heart would sink and my eyes would glaze over if someone told me that they were writing a book or had written a book about Russian Jews going to Texas in the early 20th century, as you said, the long forgotten Galveston movement, and that it was told entirely through interwoven primary sources. I mean, I would just like roll my eyes and turn and run a mile. It doesn't sound as awful as it is.

4:46into women primary sources I mean all non-fiction books are that but they also have the author's voice in there sort of guiding you through sometimes gluing it together or sort of paraphrasing when the person who said it originally didn't say it in a very good way and I just decided to not have my voice in there and let the people who were there tell the story and on the page it looks a bit weird as well because you have the names of each of the people who are speaking in the margins. And again, if I'm in a bookshop and I see a book that's laid out in a weird way, I just sort of throw it across the room.

5:23Yeah, I've just opened a book, a page at random, just so people get a sense of the visual of how it looks on the page. So the sources on page 113 are the New York Sun, David Bressler, the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and the Jewish Exponent. so that was the format but then how much time you found you had to to find gathering the sources ordering the sources selecting the sources it's absolutely mind-blowing I mean it must be harder than than writing a book which has got the authorial voice you know contextualizing the narrative? It's hard in a different way. I mean, I think I had to write, my editor forced me to write that sort of introduction to the book.

6:11And that was just awful, because I realised, you know, actually writing is being faced with a blank page and writing some absolute rubbish and hating yourself. And I actually didn't have to do that part of writing. I more had to do the later part of writing, which is the editing. So I, all my thoughts for, you know, three, the three years that it took me to write were about the structure and about the narrative arc and sort of compressing it and condensing it. And also I had to sort of, every beat of this story, I had to find someone else saying it. So if something happened, I couldn't say, and then this happened.

6:43I had to find the person who said it happened. So it felt a bit like a sort of Easter egg hunt. I had to sort of hunt down all the moments of this story. It's an astonishing, award-winning effort, Rachel, if I may say so. Let's go back to the origin story of why you set off on this Easter egg hunt. And it wasn't, in fact, the Galveston movement at all, was it? It was an interest in your father's mother, Fanny. So can you just tell everyone who your father is and who his mother was? Yes. And why you were interested in them to start with? My father is Michael Cockrell, a very nice journalist for the BBC.

7:29Famous for his political portraits and documentaries. And actually people think of him as this sort of venerable English documentary maker. But actually his mother was an immigrant. His mother's maiden name was Jockleman. So if they had been switched around, he would have been Michael Jockleman instead of Michael Cockrell. and she was the original difficult woman maybe not the original but I love it why she was a real you know she was a real character Fanny Jockelman she was born in I think 1908 and grew up in you know interwar and post-war London and you know she died in the 80s before I was born and she it's still talked about all the time Granny Fanny it's as if she's sitting around the dinner table with us Can I ask Fanny Jockerman was Jewish how did she end up in London?

8:30Her family left Ukraine just as World War I broke out so she arrived as a child my maths is so bad born in 1908 and left in 1913, 1914 and then decided to become more English than the English. She arrived speaking not a word of English and then went to, I think, UCL and read English and then became an author and a playwright. So she, I think, like so many immigrants, she just wanted to be like everyone else and fit in and sort of shake off any last remnants of her foreignness, especially, you know, in London at that time. But she didn't anglicise her name, but she did marry a very English man who wore a bowler hat.

9:11Yes. She actually, she anglicised, so she, as a young woman, she was Fanny Jockelman. And then her pen name for her novels and plays was Fanny Jocelyn. And then she married Hugh Cockrell and became Fanny Cockrell. So she anglicised her name twice. Okay, so she did anglicise her name. And then, you know, even people in her own family, she would anglicise their names as well. And say, oh, you can't possibly be called that. Let's call you something else. and was she at all observant when it came to the jewish faith or did she become did she you know was she protestant you know did she observe any faith she was nothing she she just um just sort of brushed it all off her shoulders as if it was dust um the only thing that the only sort of remnant of her judaism which she preserved was passover which she liked to run because she was difficult woman so she didn't want the men to be in charge she was always sort of fussing over everything and getting everything quite wrong and burning all the food but she passover was her thing and i think it was her love of her father which made her want to keep on doing passover but everything else she couldn't be bothered with and so your your english grandfather used to attend passover in a bowler hat or something yes sitting at the head of the table looking a bit sort of perturbed by it all so you see until you published this book i had no idea that michael was half jewish i mean of course strictly speaking she you know jewish people would not regard him as jewish but he would have been jewish enough for hitler yes and so would you be yes so uh what's then led you to to think of this as a possible book or as a family memoir i think you know as you said It's this this the fact that my grandmother was, you know, she was born a Russian Jew.

11:05And then I don't know if she necessarily died a Russian Jew or at least something was lost. And it was either lost for her generation or for, you know, her children's generation. But whatever Judaism she had did not really get passed down to me. I don't speak a word of Hebrew. I don't really, you know, I don't know any of the songs or the rituals or the traditions. and it was it you know it's sort of um poignant in a way the fact that so much you know my family has been jewish forever at least on my dad's side and the fact that that stopped with me or with my dad it feels like the end of something and i yeah felt like something to to mourn at least in a in a small way and was this a sort of itch that this sense of something that had been lost and you wanted to find it was that the the the germ of the book i think it was um i i stumbled upon my great grandfather's obituary in the new york times which said he died in 1941 and it said dr jockelman was a household name for jews across the russian empire and my dad had always said oh you know don't bother with him he's he's a real bore this is fanny's father fanny's father yeah and everyone in my family had either never mentioned him, unlike Fanny, who was always talked about, or had said, oh, he was a businessman, nothing to see here.

12:26And I thought, why is his obituary in the New York Times and why was his name a household word across a whole empire? And that was sort of the first seed that got planted. It's a great story. And it was your story. I mean, it's the kind of, you know, the best thing that could have happened to a first-time author. really yes yeah because it was you were writing not just the history of a sort of odd lost highway and byway of the history of the jews and zionism and took the search for a homeland but also of something that you were directly related to which was he was your great grandfather and he was hugely important and also he knew all the key players herzl uh for example yes i mean there's this phrase yeah I mean all these people sort of crop up in the book there's this phrase that one of them says in in the book which is he's he's thinking about the unresting chain of events i what we would think of now as the butterfly effect the way you can trace events back and back and these things that seem totally unrelated are actually related so for example you know Theodore Herzl founding Zionism I realized was the direct cause of my family being in London and my existence, you know, maybe not direct, but very indirect, the fact that everything is connected to everything else.

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14:35your great-grandfather yockelman was also involved in the founding of the state of israel and but how did you end up in london though trace the connections for the unresting chain events is as follows um my great-grandfather was at the early zionist congresses which obviously Theodor Herzl was the leader of. And then there was this very dramatic split in the Zionist movement, which most people have forgotten about, when some of them wanted Uganda to be a temporary Jewish homeland. The territorialists. Yes, the territorialists or the Ugandists, as they were called. This name that's sort of been lost to history.

15:15Versus the sort of Zion Zionists who thought it's Palestine or nothing. Has to be. Yes. Has to be the ancestral. Has to be in the Levant or nothing. Yes, this is the only possible Jewish homeland. Yes, because of the biblical part, the biblical, the history of the Judea and Sumeria. Of course, that survives all over the world as well, the Zionists, but carry on. Yeah. So my great grandfather was a Ugandist and he thought, along with the other sort of Zionist rebels, as they were called, that there at least could be some temporary Jewish homeland somewhere. Their motto was, if we cannot get the holy land, we can make another land holy.

15:56So they left the Zionist movement and founded this sort of, yeah, this rival group. And everyone, you know, this is early 1900s. All the newspapers were saying, who's going to win? Who is going to find the Jewish homeland first or, you know, establish the Jewish homeland first? Is it going to be the Zionists or the territorialists? I mean, it's all these strange little branches of history that get pruned away. and we get this nice, neat, streamlined version of events which disregards all these things which were the top of everyone's minds at the time. I suppose, strictly speaking, if you date the Jewish date to 1947, 48, then the Zionists won, but the territorialists actually founded a...

16:43Well, they didn't found anything. They just settled in Galveston, Texas, didn't they? in the first, between 1907 and 1914. Yeah, I mean, they sent 10 ,000 Russian Jews to Texas in those years. And, you know, people were saying at the time, you know, the Zionists still have nothing and the territorialists have sort of achieved something tangible. Yeah. And why did they choose Galveston? It was, I mean, it was sort of their last resort. No offense to the Galveston movement, but... Or to Texas. Or to Texas or to the immigrants who went there. But the territorialists were looking for somewhere on Earth and they approached governments all across the world saying, could we buy or borrow a piece of your land?

17:31And they were sort of turned down left, right and center. And then the American Jews said, why don't you bring them to America? We've got all these swathes of empty land, which is problematic in its own way. but we've got this young country that needs immigrants to come and build it up bring them here, just don't bring them to New York because the melting pot of New York is full and it'll overflow so let's bypass New York and go somewhere else along the east coast When you were researching it were you how did you react when you found that the antipathy to even the presence of Jews was so universal so long ago and it's, you know, compared to what we see now.

18:16What was your kind of reaction to discovering anti-Semitism for yourself? I mean, it's, you know, I am a quarter Jewish and I've never experienced anti-Semitism myself. I've got a very Gentile surname and maybe not a Gentile face, but not a, you know, people don't take one look at me and... Their Judah doesn't go off. oh judah i like that yes exactly that um so so yeah did you feel closer to your jewish heritage or antecedents when you when you started doing the book or or not i don't know if i felt closer i mean i it was definitely i felt like i knew them better i felt like i knew granny fanny better and david jockelman better and other relatives who sort of crop up in the book um but it was more I think knowledge is not necessarily feeling I didn't necessarily feel more Jewish or more of a connection to my Judaism I sort of I realised more what a transformation my family had undergone in just two or three generations Sorry to keep using terrible terms but they have sort of de-Jude Yes I mean that was a phrase that Hugo Rifkin and I were talking about this week because it's been Holocaust Memorial Day a couple of days ago and the BBC got into terrible trouble for de-Jewing Holocaust Memorial Day by making no reference to anti-Semitism or the murder of six million Jews.

19:42So anyway, it's a fascinating story whether you're caught to Jewish or not. But just again, just on that point, were you surprised to find how the world rejected Jews 100 years ago? I mean, I think the Galveston movement was almost a sort of exception to the rule in that, you know, started in 1907. And all the accounts I found were of the Texans being quite welcoming towards the Jews, a little bemused, but welcoming nonetheless. You know, they would they use this term aliens. You know, the aliens descended from the gangplank and, you know, the aliens wrote their strange postcards home in a strange script, which is obviously Yiddish, speaking in strange tongues.

20:29But I think it was more of a sense that these, you know, these figures from outer space had just sort of landed from who knows where. Texans at the time maybe had not been far outside Texas, let alone across the ocean to the old world. so you know and especially if we think of Texas now and you know the sort of xenophobia that exists there it was it was quite poignant to see how attitudes have transformed in 100 years it's odd that we've got another connection apart from being godmother and goddaughter which is that My great grandfather fled the Russian pogroms late in the late 19th century as well.

21:16And he made his own way on a ship to New York with his family and they anglicized their name. But he settled on the Upper East Side. But it was thought that New York was too full then, wasn't it? and that even if the Russian Jews wanted to go to New York because that's where the Jews were, but they went to Texas where... How many Jews were in Texas at the time? Just a smattering. I mean, so they must have created their own community of 10 ,000. It's quite a lot. And can we just ask before we talk about other things, what happened to them after they settled? Did they thrive and prosper? Did their tribe increase?

21:58Or did they assimilate? I'll tell you, but what was, do you know your, did you say your great-grandfather or your grandfather? My great-grandfather. Do you know what his name was before he anglicized it? Well, the thing is, it's not very dramatic because he anglicized it from Lowe, spelled L-O-E-W, to L-O-W-E. Right. But significant, no, significant tweak. Yeah. Because Lowe, L-O-E-W, is definitely a Jewish name. Interesting. Okay, so you're Rachel Lowe Johnson, in a way. No, my grandmother was Frances Beatrice Lowe. Oh, really? Yeah. Your question was? What happened to the Jews after they got to Galveston?

22:38I mean, this book is called Melting Point, and it's about not only the melting pot of New York and of London, but also the melting pot of America as a whole. And the Galveston Jews were sort of advised not to stay in Galveston because there was a fear that if 10 ,000 Jews stayed in Galveston or stayed in some part of Texas, they would create a Jewish ghetto, a sort of new Lower East Side, or maybe even a small Jewish state in Texas. And this was very much against American ideals. So they were encouraged to disperse across the American hinterland. The railways of America were amazing at that time, and Galveston had railway lines branching out like the five fingers of a hand.

23:29So they would arrive in Galveston one day and be in Nebraska the next day. And so they didn't, you know, they might have gone somewhere, you know, South Bend or Kansas City. So they like arrive, build their own houses, start their own companies. I mean, extraordinary. Yeah, I mean, but I mean, it is extraordinary and also sad that, you know, unlike the Lower East Side where you would hear Yiddish and Polish and Russian. Still do? Exactly. You know, in the air and it would feel almost like you were back in the old world. Maybe in Kansas City, it wouldn't quite feel like that. And you wouldn't have your, you wouldn't really have your home comforts.

24:11And I think the Jews of, the Galveston Jews did sort of melt into the melting pot faster than the New York Jews. although you know the people the main character in this book who's actually not my grandfather my great grandfather a chap called Israel Zangwill said that on the Lower East Side they were beginning to speak Yiddish with a twang so even they were melting into the melting pot they were assimilating

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25:22In the second half of the book, it's much more family memoir. And the Guardian, who gave you a wonderful review and writes, one gets a thrilling sense of history unfolding in real time, of people confused and flailing about in response to immediate events without any sense of what we know now. they also talk about the split in an intensely close-knit family along what you call two paths that have been inching further and further apart ever since can you tell everyone what that split was and how the family divided the first I knew of this split I mean you might have surmised already that I was and maybe still am quite sort of uncurious person with sort of blinkers.

26:18But, you know, I encountered this branch of my family maybe five or six years ago at a party in North London where these strange long lost relatives who live in Tel Aviv came over. And I didn't know how they were related to me. I didn't know why they were speaking Hebrew. but they turned out to be the descendants of my grandmother's sister. So my grandmother, granny Fanny. Fanny, this is Sonia. Exactly. Had a sister called Sonia. So Fanny Jockleman and Sonia Jockleman. And Fanny married a nice English gentleman and Sonia married an also nice Russian Zionist who said to her, you know, they got married in the 1930s and said to her, when the state of Israel is founded, will you come with me and live there?

27:07and that's what she did. So these two sisters who had grown up together and had brought up their children in a house in North London together. This is sort of the crux of my book. This house, 22 Mapesbury Road, had sort of 13 or 14 people in it and this is where my dad grew up. The children of these two sisters and the two sisters and their respective husbands. This house sort of split and then you know when when half half the family went to israel and never sort of never sort of unsplit and they speak hebrew and so you've got a whole branch of of nation they're not called because sonia would have married somebody at the russians honest so you've got sort of distant cousins who made aliyah as we say who you know decided to go and live in in their promised land and do you have have you seen them since i have i um i've sort of got to know them quite well and you know this i'm always thinking about sort of forks in the road and what could have been that was what i was thinking yeah the fork in the road exactly and it's it's sort of the that metaphor sort of made literal a chance to see this sort of um what could have been or this sort of parallel path that one part of my family took which my family very definitely did not take it's very odd to see you sitting here such sort of an english rose and yet i mean your your background kind of encompasses so much about early zionism the foundation of the state of israel the diaspora the the situ you know the territorialists the zionists everything is gathered together in this one book.

28:51Rachel it's a wonderful book. Everyone it's called Melting Point and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It was long listed for the Bailey Gifford Prize for non-fiction and in my view it should have won. But I'm sure it will win many many other awards. Can we talk a bit more about you and what you're going to do next Rachel? It's been a real journey. You had to go all over to do the book. At any point did you think I'm mad I am absolutely mad um to do a book that doesn't have really have me in it that tells a story that um has is long forgotten and so on and so on and then of course it became the hottest subject in town this the the the kind of only in a sense you know a kind of a subject of obsessional media interest as well.

29:49So you were rewarded by the fates, weren't you? Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know if I felt mad, but I know that everyone around me thought I was. Because you've got two sisters. Both of them are writers. Yes. And some other sisters as well. Other sisters as well, because you're one of seven. But did you have a sense of sort of destiny that you had to do this? I don't think it was destiny. I think it was delusion. And I think, you know, for anyone listening who wants to be a writer or is a writer, I think delusion is such a crucial ingredient. I think it also helped that it was the pandemic and everyone was in a slightly strange headspace and I definitely was.

30:34But, you know, my parents that said, what is she doing writing this book about the origins of Zionism? But I said it to you as well. My godmother said it to me as well. You know, I sent the first draft to my sister Isabel and she called me sort of in a blind panic, you know, four minutes later saying, what is this? What is this rubbish? And when I sent it to my agent, she also said, what is this rubbish? She actually then changed her mind about it. You see, if I'd read the whole thing, maybe, I think at the time I read the chunk you sent, I was pretty illiterate and uneducated about the origins of the state of Israel.

31:15But of course, everybody's been on a crash course. It's like we all know about Venezuelan oil now, but we really do have had to learn a lot. So anyway, so then in terms of timings and fates, how did it feel when suddenly the world was obsessed with this very story and the legitimacy of the Jews to claim their homeland in that plot? I mean, part of the, I don't know, the thing that has been, I guess, crucial about this book for me is that it is not me making an argument. It's me trying to sort of present the debates as they unfolded in 1948 and earlier and present this subject of a Jewish homeland being sort of turned over and over by people for, you know, 50 years and so much longer.

32:06and every answer sort of being the wrong answer and every end being the dead end, everything having a caveat. And I guess, you know, yeah, I didn't have, I wasn't sort of laying out an argument in this book. I was trying to question my own views and also hopefully make the reader question their views and sort of slightly destabilize the reader. However, they go into this book thinking, hopefully they just feel slightly more unstable in their sort of neat principles about things. And Rachel, I mean, difficult second book. Are you underway? I'm underway is a strong word, but I've dipped my toe in the water.

32:47It's got a lot of dynamic action. Yes. Yeah, I wish I was underway, but I'm a bit earlier than underway. By the way, I'm incredibly superstitious about talking about projects. Oh, good, me too. Just because I have this, I always think it's like letting the fizz out of the bottle. Yes. The cap's off. If you've talked about it, it's like you're never going to do it. It's going flat, yeah. I mean, all I'll say is that if I do ever finish another book, I think and hope that it'll be told in the same style or a similar style just because I sort of love this weird form of primary sources and I think that it can be applied to books not only about Russian Jews going to Texas.

33:32I can't wait to discover the next subject. I mean, are you allowed to say what it could be? It's 20th century again, but some more Gentiles in it this time. I can't wait. I mean, it's going to be wonderful. Now, let's just let everyone know a little bit more about Rachel Cockerell. I thought you were at St. Paul's. I thought you were going to be a kind of Zulika Dobson at Oxford, but you went to the Courtauld. you became a kind of artist or interested in art history. I dabbled, yes. And you could have... Another thing we share, both old Paulinas. I know. I mean, I was thinking about, you know, the whole difficult woman thing.