One summer day 10 years ago, Rachel Cockerell gathered with dozens of family members for a cousin’s 80th birthday party in the North London house where her father had grown up.
Among the guests were relatives from Israel. Cockerell had always known that alongside her impeccably Anglo ancestors, she had descended from Russian Jews through her father’s mother. But she never knew her Granny Fanny; she had never celebrated Jewish holidays. A perennial jar of borscht in the cupboard had been the extent of her Jewishness. “It was so peripheral in my vision,” she said recently.
Something about spending the afternoon with Hebrew-accented cousins in the overgrown backyard of 22 Mapesbury Road sparked her imagination. Cockerell, who is now 30, Googled this branch’s paterfamilias, her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. Up came his New York Times obituary from 1941. It stated: “His name was a household word in Jewish homes throughout Eastern Europe.”
That one sentence turned out to determine how she would spend much of the next several years of her life.
Prowling century-old newspaper articles and digitized memoirs, Cockerell put Jochelmann’s story at the heart of what became her first book, “Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,” published last year in Britain and May 6 in the United States.
Cockerell’s great-grandfather David Jochelmann (with his wife, Tamara) is a pivotal figure in the family history and in the book.Credit…via Rachel Cockerell
