On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamt, but to Texas. They are led by Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann. This is the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten moment in American history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the lead-up to World War I.

Jochelmann belongs to a group of rebel Zionists impatient for an alternative to Palestine. Their motto: ‘If we cannot get the Holy Land, we can make another land holy.’ Spearheaded by Israel Zangwill, a world-famous novelist, they scour the earth for a temporary homeland—from Australia to Canada, Angola to Antarctica—before reluctantly settling on Galveston. Zangwill fears the Jewish people will be absorbed into the great American melting pot, but he sees no other hope.

In a highly inventive style, Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles and interviews to create a new form of non-fiction. It is constructed entirely of primary sources, one flowing into the next, so long-dead voices reanimate, jostle for space, and converge to tell a story with novel-like vividness and detail. 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—including Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. It asks what it means to belong, and what can be salvaged from the past, and whether a promised land can ever live up to its promises.