Perhaps the greatest legacy of May O’Callaghan’s communist sojourn was a story of enduring friendship and eventually love
May O’Callaghan: it was her mastery of languages, Russian in particular, that in 1924 brought her to the Soviet Union
But in the mid-1920s, the Lux was a “living quarters for the world revolution”. And among its residents for several years then was a forty-something Irishwoman, May O’Callaghan, whose contribution to revolutionary history has until now gone unnoticed in the land of her birth.
But from Vienna, she later intended to travel west, to America, to promote her Austrian brother-in-law’s business. Instead, she got as far only as England before the first World War intervened to keep her this side of the Atlantic. It was her mastery of languages, Russian in particular, that in 1924 brought O’Callaghan to the Soviet Union, a country anxious to get its message out to the world and with no shortage of speeches to translate.
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