Thread by @MauriceJCasey

This photo shows Elisa, a woman born in Moscow in 1925, arm in arm with the love of her life Joyce.

Taken on Dublin's O'Connell Bridge around 1963, I found it in a garden shed in Galicia in 2021.

Let me tell you how 🧵 1/

It all began in 2016, when I began my PhD on Irish women and international communism.

I was astonished to discover that in the final Kremlin Palace debates between Stalin and Trotsky, an Irish woman named May O'Callaghan led an English translation team.

This is May in Moscow:

I became determined to find out all I could about this Irish woman in Moscow.

May lived in Moscow's famous Hotel Lux from 1924.

But in 1928, some unexpected news from a friend forced her to leave the hotel behind.

In 1925, May's German friend Emmy Leonhard went into labour in the Hotel Lux.

May provided Emmy with the cab to take her to the Kremlin Hospital, where she gave birth to her first daughter Elisa.

This is Emmy and baby Elisa together in Moscow, 1925:

Emmy left Moscow behind, but May remained. Her Hotel Lux room became a kind of Moscow literary salon of the mid-1920s.

May was particularly fond of the Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty. She helped him publish Soviet editions of his novels.

Fatefully, May introduced her new friend Liam to one of her oldest friends: Nellie, a radical from an East London Jewish family.

In 1928, May received some surprising news: Nellie was pregnant.

The father? Liam O'Flaherty.

May left Moscow behind to assist Nellie, believing herself partly responsible for the whole affair.

Nellie's daughter Joyce was born in New York in 1929.

This is a picture of May holding Joyce close to the Manhattan apartment Nellie and May shared with the new arrival.

Can you tell where this is going? Let's recap:

May O'Callaghan's time in Moscow's Hotel Lux was bookended by the birth of two children: daughters of two of her closest friends.

Little Elisa (b. 1925), pictured left, and baby Joyce (b. 1929), on the right.

In 2017, I traced the remnants of May O'Callaghan's archive to Joyce's god-daughter, Pippa.

Pippa told me she kept a box of love letters sent to Joyce in her attic.

Reading them, I was astonished. I knew exactly who wrote them: Elisa, the girl born in the Kremlin hospital.

It turned out that Joyce and Elisa met as adults on the other side of the Second World War and fell in love.

May O'Callaghan introduced them.

I was blown away. Suddenly, I could trace the story a single romance against the background of twentieth century world revolution.

In 2021, I traced Elisa's nephew to a coastal village in Galicia.

He kindly let me search around his garden shed for material, where I found the photograph that opens this thread.

For me, this photo symbolises the connections between us today and past love stories.

The average Dubliner in 1963 may just have seen two close friends walking arm in arm.

Through research and understanding, we can see two women in love, brought together by a remarkable sweep of history.

It is the role - and privilege - of the historian to tell these stories.

Joyce and Elisa's love story made me determined to trace many more of the unexpected legacies of this extraordinary place and moment: the 1920s Hotel Lux.

My book, which tells a history of the 20th century as the story of May, Emmy, Elisa, Nellie and Joyce, is out today.

Wow, thank you for this response! Let me reveal a further extraordinary detail.

Early in my research, I discovered Joyce later became Joyce Rathbone.

Her mother Nellie married a man named Hugo Rathbone, who had lived in Room 349 of the Hotel Lux.

Here's Hugo:

When I googled Joyce Rathbone in 2016, I discovered she died years previously.

But a former student (she was a piano teacher) mentioned her on his blog.

That student? @ArmandDAngour - the Dean of the exact college where I was doing my PhD!

Let me jump on the popularity of this thread to let you know I write a free newsletter Archive Rats where I share my research adventures.

You can subscribe here:

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