Publishers Weekly
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Cockerell’s captivating debut recounts a largely forgotten plan to settle Russian Jews in Texas at the turn of the last century. Initially, Cockerell planned to write a memoir about her grandmother and great aunt, who raised seven children together in a giant Edwardian home in 1940s London. But research into Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who moved the family to England from Kyiv at the start of WWI, revealed that he was a key figure in convincing Jews to escape early 20th-century pogroms in Russia by moving to Texas. Drawing from interviews with her surviving family members and a global archive of written sources, Cockerell pieces together first-person accounts narrating the history of 20th-century Zionism. She begins with Theodor Herzl’s 1896 proposal for a Jewish homeland in Palestine before tracing the splintering of that movement, including Jochelmann’s successful establishment of a significant Jewish presence in San Antonio. “Is this your golden America?” asks one recent arrival to the city. “Muddy streets, unpaved, with miserable little shacks... just like in Russia’s shtetlech!” In Cockerell’s hands, pre-WWI New York City and London brim with competing Yiddish theaters and raucous debates about cultural assimilation. While Jochelmann remains something of an enigma, Cockerell vividly conjures the world he helped create. Readers will be enthralled. Photos. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co. (May)

Library Journal
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Cockerell narrates the introduction and conclusion to this family saga about her great-grandfather David Jochelmann's daring plan, formulated in 1907 with Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill, to help Russian Jews escape the pogroms. After searching across several continents (including Antarctica) for a temporary Jewish homeland, Jochelmann and Zangwill settled on Galveston, TX, as the port of entry to the U.S. and brought 10,000 Russian Jews to Texas in the lead-up to World War I. The rest of the book is skillfully narrated by UK voice actor Goodman, who voices Jochelmann, Zangwill, and other figures as they appear throughout Cockerell's three-part debut memoir. The audiobook brings the rescue efforts (whose supporters were as far-flung as London, New York, and Jerusalem) vividly to life, immersing listeners in the stories of the Jews escaping persecution in Russia, as they traveled by land to Germany and then set sail for Texas. VERDICT Cockerell's narrative highlights the history of Jews in the American West and connects their experiences to the founding of the state of Israel. This essential account of a lesser-known chapter of history combines heartfelt family memoir with solid archival research.—Sharon Sherman

Kirkus
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Multivocal history, focusing on the author’s family, of the European Jewish diaspora. Part of Cockerell’s family arrived in London from Ukraine when World War I broke out, and for her great-grandfather, in some ways, “his pre-war existence belonged to a lost world.” That existence included work in the highest reaches of Theodor Herzl’s original Zionist movement, which sought a homeland in an unfriendly world. With Herzl and, importantly, the largely forgotten intellectual and writer Israel Zangwill, David Jochelmann sought that homeland across the globe, including by means of the so-called Galveston Plan, where 10,000 Jews arrived in the U.S. by way of the Texas port, “sent there from Russia by my great-grandfather.” With a narrative whose voices are drawn from a vast range of published sources—books, letters, newspaper and journal articles—Cockerell gives shape to Jochelmann, perhaps the least known of the Zionist leaders. Along the way she looks at the slow elaboration of what would become the Jewish nation: at one point Palestine, which theNew York Sun called “smaller than the State of New Jersey,” and later, in a misbegotten episode, British East Africa, “one of the few sections of Africa where white men may thrive,” which led to a rebellion against Herzl by many followers, intent on settling in Palestine instead. For many, the destination proved to be New York City, with theTribune opining, “Few outside the Jewish world appreciate the vast difficulties involved in the Americanization of the Russian Hebrew,” while the financier Jacob Schiff urged that “the Jew of the future is, to my mind, the Russian Jew transformed by American methods.” Jochelmann himself (losing the second “n” after arriving) went to London, helping organize anti-Nazi resistance but dying before the horrors of the Holocaust became known, and before the independent Jewish state he envisioned took shape. An innovative, rewarding contribution to Jewish history. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.