Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell review – the hunt for a homeland | History books
When she started work on this fabulous book about her family, Rachel Cockerell was most intrigued by her grandmother Fanny and great aunt Sonia, who “raised children together in a giant, Edwardian north London house in the 1940s”. She envisaged only a few sentences about their father, David Jochelmann, who brought them over from Kyiv at the start of the first world war and lived in the same house until he died in 1941. But although the family remembered him only as a “businessman”, research soon revealed a fascinating…