Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals

Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals 
Maurice J Casey

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 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 iterations and beyond.

Culminating in a queer love story that saw the daughters of the Cohens and Leonhards create an enduring partnership, 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.