In the preface to Melting Point, Rachel Cockerell writes of her dislike for books that claim to be “experimental”. Yet this book, her first, is unusual itself. Though it’s the history of both her own family and that of Zionism in the late-19th and 20th centuries, she speaks only at the beginning and end. Gone, in the rest, is the degree of certainty projected by a more typical historical narrative, with its questioning, yet ultimately commanding, authorial voice. She allows her subjects – whethe