In one of his most quoted moments, Karl Marx wrote that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

In his original German, Marx actually said that the past weighs “wie ein alp,” like an Alpine mountain; a more brutal assessment, but less quotable. Seventy years after Marx said (or didn’t quite say) this, an early chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses depicted an awkward exchange between Mr Deasy, an antisemitic British schoolmaster, and Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s stand-in, in the course of which Dedalus labels history “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

It’s more than a bit clichéd to point out that history is written by the winners. For Marx though, the structures of capitalism, handed down from the past, constrain all of us. The winners might write history, but Marx did not believe they could ever truly outrun it. Joyce’s view, conversely, was that the true mark of being a winner is the luxury to ignore history. It is the rest of us who are trapped in its nightmares.

Marx and Joyce both sought to escape from specific histories; Marx was the premier non-Jewish Jew. The grandson of a rabbi, his works were riddled with antisemitic asides, as if he wanted to distance himself from that putative Jewishness. Joyce lived outside of Ireland for most his life, remained uneasy about the essentializing claims of Irish nationalism (and instead, via Ulysses’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, embraced the open-ended identities of diasporic Jews), and yet all his literary works returned to that Irish past he could seemingly never escape.

If history is so crushingly inescapable — so structurally determined, in Marx’s vocabulary — what then are the usable histories we can use? What pasts can we look to that can help us imagine different futures? Belfast-based historian Maurice Casey’s debut book Hotel Lux offers an “intimate history” of “forgotten radicals” at similar intersections of Jewishness, Irishness, and Marxism. What Casey has done here is to find individuals on the fringes of the communist movement and track the intimacies of their political lives; it is a history of small historical figures and the contingent choices they made amid much bigger events over which they had little to no control.

The keystone figure in the book is May O’Callaghan, an Irish-born polymath whose first exposure to left-wing politics came via a job as secretary to Sylvia Pankhurst, the pioneering suffragette and an early English supporter of the Russian Revolution. Seemingly apolitical prior to the 1910s, O’Callaghan followed Pankhurst into communism and by the early 1920s was using her impressive language skills to work as a leading translator for the Communist International while living at the Hotel Lux.

A formerly swanky building in Moscow commandeered by the Soviet government for international guests, the hotel provides Casey with both his title and the book’s central framing device. The narrative he traces moves out in a spiral to include a cast of other residents at the hotel in 1920s; Nellie and Rose Cohen, two daughters of recently arrived Jewish immigrants to the East End of London with whom O’Callaghan was already on intimate terms prior to her move to Moscow; Joseph Freeman, also of Ashkenazi background, who had come to Moscow from the United States and would later gain renown as a communist man of letters; the two brothers Tom and Liam O’Flaherty, the former an emerging leader of the Communist Party USA, the latter a famed novelist, both of whose hard-drinking personas approached being caricatures of their Irishness; Emmy Leonhard, a committed German anti-fascist; and Elise Saborosky Ewert, a globe-trotting communist known to her comrades as “Sabo.”

In the stories Casey unearths about them, it is clear that this cohort of people were deeply impressed by the revolutionary excitement of 1920s Moscow. Alongside this, though, Casey also narrates how they carried out their regular lives — parties, book clubs, romantic entanglements, weekend trips to dachas — amid these much larger political developments. Their lives were oddly normal and ordinary in a context that was so un-normal and extraordinary.

Biographies of communists are legion: Isaac Deutscher’s Leon Trotsky trilogy, Paul Le Blanc’s studies of Vladimir Lenin, Ronald Grigor Suny’s monumental volume on Joseph Stalin’s youth, a seeming mini-industry of Marx biographies. Early in his own work though, Casey points to an obvious problem with these (often door-stopping) books; few if any of us will reach the commanding heights of a revolution, a nation-state, or a political party. Rather than any “great man” views of history, a truly usable left-wing past can instead be found in what Casey calls “more ordinary revolutionary lives” more relatable to our own. The interlocutors he assembles in the book are mostly female, sometimes nonnormative in their sex lives if not fully embracing what today would be called a “queer” identity, defined as much by their frailties, failings, and personal anxieties as by any political heroics or the wielding of power. There is here a focus on moments of joy and euphoria at odds with histories of the global left conventionally understood in terms of state repression or political failure.

There is a definite novelistic vibe to the proceedings, with Casey chronicling the most intimate aspects of his subjects’ frequently turbulent lives. In carrying out research, whether on the toweringly famous or the totally obscure, there can come a moment, he notes, when “suddenly, an entire lost life becomes fully realised in our own imagination.” The risk, of course, is that in these acts of the imagination, historians are in fact inventing a suitably neat formulation of the person that might not quite align with the messiness of the historical record. We may end up partially inventing memories of the past in service of the politics of the present.

Conversely, Casey mostly does seem to know when to edge away from that danger. The book’s narrative arc is periodically broken up with accounts of the author’s own travails identifying and accessing archival materials in Ireland, the West Coast of the United States, state archives in Moscow, and, less glamorously, various musty boxes found in attics and storage sheds in Britain and Spain where some of his most revealing insights were discovered. In these reflections, he thinks through the limits of what we can ever truly know about figures like May O’Callaghan and the inescapable fact that so much of what they said or did has been lost. The narrative laid out in the book is defined almost as much by silences and gaps; communists who had ended up on opposing sides following the expulsion of Leon Trotsky and who delicately skirted around certain sensitive political topics with each other; people so scarred by their experiences that they avoided facing up to painful memories; activists who, even at the time, compartmentalized the rise of Stalinism and the Purges, “forgetting” what was taking place even as it was happening around them; a lost sense of hope in a brighter socialist future.

How and why anything gets preserved and remembered is markedly political. Secret police maintained extensive records on both communist leaders and the communist rank and file. Joseph Freeman’s papers are preserved in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, product of a long-standing conservative American desire to produce politically usable knowledge about the Soviet Union. Almost circling back on himself, Casey recounts research trips to Moscow when he saw memorializations of those killed in the Purges, small white plaques since ripped down following the invasion of Ukraine. History is forgotten, then remembered, only to be dismembered all over again. Memory and forgetting as well as attempts to move beyond the narrower confines of national-focused histories have become fashionable topics in recent years in Ireland, and consciously or not, Casey is writing under these influences. His truly international focus, though, is rare for an Irish historian.

The later lives of his characters moved from the dramatic and tragic to the quietly subdued. Sabo was arrested in Brazil in the mid-1930s, deported “home” to Nazi Germany, and then murdered at Ravensbrück concentration camp in the summer of 1939. Emmy Leonhard country-hopped across Europe, attempting to stay one step ahead of the Nazis, before arriving in Mexico early on in World War II with her young daughters and an ailing husband. Rose Cohen was arrested by the NKVD in August 1937 and shot by firing squad three months later. Her sister Nellie Cohen gave birth to a daughter, Joyce, in February 1929; the father was Liam O’Flaherty. Already a married man by this point and a citizen of an Irish state cruelly hostile to unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children, O’Flaherty would not learn of his secret daughter for many years.

Joseph Freeman soured on communism in the later 1930s, as the excesses of Stalinism became increasingly impossible to deny. Yet in private writings, he returned again and again to those moments in the Hotel Lux in the mid-1920s, relitigating events in his own mind, recognizing that his experiences there had been seminal for his own political and literary development. May O’Callaghan tried repeatedly to return to Moscow but whispers about her alleged Trotskyist leanings made her unwelcome. Her later years were lived in quiet anonymity; she acted as a surrogate mother for Joyce Cohen and worked behind the counter of a London bookshop.

In one of the blurbs for the book, Roy Foster — a donnish name in Irish academia — calls out these people’s “delusions,” but that is to adopt a presentist smugness, assuming a clarity in hindsight that was never so apparent at the time. The historian Ciaran Brady has rightly pointed out that mainstream Irish historiography often displays that kind of ironizing attitude that easily slips over into “a facile desire to shock, amuse or deride.” And to be fair, Casey has the good sense not to fall into that trap, clearly remembering that at the time communism appeared as a more feasible proposition — something that others might want to forget today.

There is a moment about two-thirds into the book where the narrative is about to lag, and certainly juggling the lives of so many diverse figures is not always easy. The birth of Joyce Cohen does reenliven the stories being told, and Casey has a sharp eye for human detail and for the unusual coincidences uniting all these characters together. The residents of Hotel Lux were hardly heroes in any sense — May O’Callaghan had a selfless devotion to revolutionary politics as well as, in many of her private letters, a love for needlessly catty comments about even close friends — but the intertwining stories told in this book are more relatable as a result.