
Melting Point
Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
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Narrated by:
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Henry Goodman
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Rachel Cockerell
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By:
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Rachel Cockerell
About this listen
Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
A New York Times Most Anticipated Book
This dazzling, innovative family memoir tells the story of a long-lost plan to create a Jewish state in Texas.
On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamed, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather. The journey marks the beginning of the Galveston Movement, a forgotten moment in history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the leadup to World War I.
The charismatic leader of the movement is Jochelmann’s closest friend, Israel Zangwill, whose novels have made him famous across Europe and America. As Eastern Europe becomes infected by antisemitic violence, Zangwill embarks on a desperate search for a temporary homeland—from Australia to Canada, Angola to Antarctica—before reluctantly settling on Galveston. He fears the Jewish people will be absorbed into the great American melting pot, but there is no other hope.
In a highly inventive style, Cockerell captures history as it unfolds, weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, and interviews into a vivid account. Melting Point follows Zangwill and the Jochelmann family through two world wars, to London, New York, and Jerusalem—as their lives intertwine with some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century, and each chooses whether to cling to their history or melt into their new surroundings. It is a story that asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2025 Rachel Cockerell (P)2025 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Thank you for this important history
- By cindy on 06-22-25
By: Michael Luo
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The Work of Empire
- War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines
- By: Justin F. Jackson
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands.
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The Director
- By: Daniel Kehlmann
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark.
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The sharpness of the story, utterly convincing characters, and the moral focus
- By hans sandberg on 06-13-25
By: Daniel Kehlmann
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Justice for Marcus Garvey
- Look for Me in the Whirlwind
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates - foreword, Julius Garvey - editor
- Narrated by: James Fouhey, Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a Black political activist, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, which had a following of more than six million African descended people worldwide. Despite his massive popularity, this Jamaican born international leader was wrongfully sentenced to prison by the U.S. government on trumped-up mail-fraud charges.
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates - foreword, and others
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Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
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Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz
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Spitfires
- The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II
- By: Becky Aikman
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses—all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone—even Americans, even women—transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft.
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Beautifully Written
- By JAL on 07-05-25
By: Becky Aikman
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Every Monument Will Fall
- A Story of Remembering and Forgetting
- By: Dan Hicks
- Narrated by: Dan Hicks
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.
By: Dan Hicks
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536 AD
- The Worst Year to Be Alive in the History of Humankind
- By: Kamal Khalaf
- Narrated by: Zack Zimbler
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In 536 AD, the sun dimmed, the sky turned a ghostly gray, and global temperatures plummeted. Crops withered, famine spread like wildfire, and entire civilizations were thrown into chaos. Historians and scientists now recognize this year as one of the most catastrophic climate events in human history—a volcanic winter that reshaped the world.
By: Kamal Khalaf
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Antisocial
- Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation
- By: Andrew Marantz
- Narrated by: Andrew Marantz
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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From a rising star at The New Yorker, a deeply immersive chronicle of how the optimistic entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley set out to create a free and democratic internet - and how the cynical propagandists of the alt-right exploited that freedom to propel the extreme into the mainstream.
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Amazing read!!!
- By Nick H on 10-23-19
By: Andrew Marantz
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A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
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Disaster
- By Frank Dudley Berry Jr. on 08-01-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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Eichmann in Jerusalem
- A Report on the Banality of Evil
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt's authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt's postscript. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative - an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the 20th century.
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Both a Monster and a Clown
- By Darwin8u on 08-13-13
By: Hannah Arendt
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The Peepshow
- The Murders at Rillington Place
- By: Kate Summerscale
- Narrated by: Nicola Walker
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
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A thoroughly researched time
- By Caitlyn Harrison on 06-03-25
By: Kate Summerscale
Tasting history unfolding....
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It did be Focus too much on Galveston. I thought that was the main idea for the book.
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terribly annoying narration
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