Sydney Writers Festival: Rachel Cockerell
Rachel Cockerell set out to write a straight forward work of non-fiction about her Great-grandfather, David Jochelmann, who had migrated from Russia to England in the 1900s. She had mountains of extraordinarily detailed research but she felt like her voice was in the way. So she decided to start again. The result is a book that, other than her introduction, has not one word on the page from Rachel as the author. It’s a work of family memoir and historical creative non-fiction told entirely through primary sources; newspaper articles, letters, diary entries, eye witness accounts, memoirs from people who lived through different times. Reading it makes you feel like the people from the past are speaking directly to you, as if you’ve entered a time machine and travelled to Vienna, Basel, Galveston Texas, New York & London.
As well being a story about her family, Rachel gives us the voices, speeches, letters and diary entries of some of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century. From Viennese journalist, playwright, lawyer Dr Theodore Herzl to President Theodore Roosevelt of America, to writers like DH Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and playwrights including John Dos Passos. Rachel and I spoke about her family history and how she learned where their individual stories sat in the larger stories of world history. We spoke about identity, exile and belonging, about assimilation, about culture and how its preserved and how quickly it can be lost. How history can be unearthed and written about and she shows us (using their own words) how people all over the world, from different cultures, classes and mindsets, have been grappling with the issues we grapple with today.
‘Melting Point’ reinvigorates how family stories can be told and at its heart this is a book about what it means to truly belong somewhere and how people become who they are.
This may be my book of the year and it was a great thing to get to speak with Rachel as part of a Sydney Writers Festival out of season event.
