MAURICE J. CASEY
Footnote Press
£15
ISBN 9781804441183
REVIEWED BY
Brian Trench
Brian Trench is a former lecturer in the School of Communications, DCU.
By the mid-1920s, as communist ambitions shrank to socialism in one country, the role of the Comintern, became primarily that of defending the Soviet Union. In this context, leading figures in international communism spent periods in Moscow contributing to the Russian party’s propaganda efforts, and also working through their internal differences under the Comintern’s supervision. Many of these activists stayed in the Hotel Lux, making lasting connections with each other and with Russian comrades that were deeply personal as well as political, but that in some cases exposed them to the merciless attention of the Soviet state’s security apparatus. Maurice Casey’s remarkable book follows the stories of about a dozen of these Moscow visitors from several countries, all of them in one way or another connected to a central figure, May O’Callaghan.
This County Wexford-born languages graduate of the University of Vienna was older than those who circled around her and to whom she became a mentor and matriarch. She spent most of 1924–9 in the Hotel Lux, arriving at a time of infinite possibilities and leaving when suspicion and paranoia were rampant. Joseph Brennan, an American writer, was there for just eight months, but the intense experiences stayed with him for decades, even when he was no longer a communist. Emmy Leonhard, from Germany, continued her radical political work for decades after her short spell in Moscow. Rose Cohen, from London’s East End, stayed longer and fell foul of Stalin’s regime; she was executed in 1937. Nellie Cohen, Rose’s sister, lived her post-Lux years in England with her (and Liam O’Flaherty’s) daughter, Joyce.
O’Callaghan and the Cohen sisters first met in London, where they worked together on the publications and campaigns of Sylvia Pankhurst. Along with Brennan and Leonhard, they are the most prominent in a larger cast of characters whose interweaving stories Casey narrates with great skill. The materials came from research in personal, organisational and state archives in Moscow, Dublin, California, Oregon, a Cotswolds cottage and a garden shed in Galicia. Being able to read Russian is one of the attributes that Casey brings to this work, but endless curiosity and perseverance are others; with these come good luck, and Casey has enjoyed much of that. The author does not shy away from telling us of his experiences in tracking down information or finding nuggets in piles of dross. He breaks through the narrator–historian wall frequently to give detail, colour and comment on the research process. At one point he sets out briefly his credo on the meaning of the Russian revolution, which helps in understanding his emphases and exclusions. At another point he names one artefact that he found as ‘the most remarkable historical document’.
Among the thousands of pages that he handled, what stands out for him is a hand-drawn and handwritten newspaper, originally titled Alpenpost, reflecting its origins in Switzerland. This was the work of two girls, produced for a readership of two, their parents. Elisa and Alida lived in several places of exile with their mother, Emmy Leonhard, while their father, Edo Fimmen, pursued a peripatetic life as International Transport Workers’ Federation leader and anti-fascist fighter. The family was eventually reunited in Mexico for the last year of Edo’s life. Despite their long separation, Emmy and Edo had better fortune than many of their comrades, who were victims of Nazism and Stalinism in roughly equal measure.
The girls’ newspaper kept Emmy and Edo abreast of their precocious thoughts on the turbulent affairs of the time but also bore witness to their support for their parents’ lifelong activism. I found Casey’s sympathetic and sensitive attention to this document and to its creators deeply moving. He observes that the collection of these newspapers was the only ordered part of a chaotic collection of family papers that he found after years of hunting for Alida’s son, eventually locating him in Galicia. Casey observes that friendship and love are also factors in the preservation of archives.
Also in that Galician garden shed he found detailed confirmation of the connection between two of Casey’s central characters, already linked through May O’Callaghan’s vital help to their mothers when they were giving birth. These were Elisa, daughter of Emmy Leonhard, born in Moscow in 1925, and Joyce, daughter of Nellie Cohen, born in 1929 in London. They met, in their twenties, in Switzerland in 1949 and a decade later they acknowledged their love for each other. The papers in a black bag in a garden shed were the second part of the love-letters through which they maintained their relationship, Casey having found the first part in the attic of an English cottage.
Academic historians may baulk at Casey’s expressions of delight and frustration in the telling of these incidents in his research. I greatly appreciated his questioning of the supposed objectivity of history and the emotional intelligence and reflexivity that he brought to this work. Hotel Lux is Casey’s first book. His next will be keenly anticipated.