Hotel Lux
An Intimate History of Communism's Forgotten Radicals
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The extraordinary story of a group of forgotten radicals who found themselves drawn to communist Moscow’s hotbed of international revolutionary activity: the Hotel Lux.
Hotel Lux follows Irish radical May O’Callaghan and her friends, three revolutionary families brought together by their vision for a communist future and their time spent in the Comintern’s Moscow living quarters, the Hotel Lux.
Historian Maurice Casey reveals the connections and disconnections of a group of forgotten communist activists whose lives collided in 1920s Moscow: a brilliant Irish translator, a maverick author, the rebel daughters of an East London Jewish family, and a family of determined German anti-fascists.
The dramatic and interlocking histories of the O’Flahertys, Cohens and Leonhards offer an intimate insight into the legacies of the Russian Revolution from its earliest idealism through to the brutal Stalinist purges and beyond. Hotel Lux uncovers a world of forgotten radicals who saw their hopes and dreams crash against reality yet retained their faith in a beautiful future for all.
Culminating in a queer love story that saw the daughters of the Cohens and Leonhards create an enduring partnership even as their parents’ political visions crumbled, this is a multi-generational rebel odyssey and a history of international communism, one which looks as much to the future as it does to the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vibrant debut from historian Casey, a hotel in 1920s Moscow serves as unofficial headquarters to a group of expat revolutionaries whose exploits "would seem outlandish in a work of fiction." They include Irish communist–turned–London suffragette May O'Callaghan, dispatched by fellow feminists to witness the aftermath of the October Revolution; London-born Polish-Jewish radical organizer Nellie Cohen, who emigrated to put her talents at the service of the Comintern with her sister, Rose, only for the latter to disappear in Stalin's purges; dashing and self-mythologizing Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty; tormented New York poet Joseph Freedman; and married German trade unionists Edo and Emmy Fimmen. Casey's narrative, which is split between political intrigue (O'Callaghan's plans to make O'Flaherty a mouthpiece of the revolution; the repression of Freedman's memoir An American Testament once he falls afoul of Russian censors) and personal calamity (Emmy's pregnancy while Edo is waylaid abroad in futile efforts against the rise of the Nazis; the womanizing O'Flaherty's scandalous relationship with Cohen), depicts this found family of "restless souls with impossible desires" as everyday foot soldiers of a global revolution, without whose commitment (and messiness) the careers of more vaunted figures would not be possible (American novelist Theodore Dreiser, Marxist philosopher Simone Weil, and exiled dissident writer Victor Serge all make appearances). Told in novelistic prose and narrated like an archival detective story, this enchants.
