Tomás Ó Flatharta

Thanks to Maurice Casey for this story : a postcard from Paul Kirchoff to Leon Trotsky, sent from Ireland in May 1933. Source ; Paul Kirchoff to Leon Trotsky, Dublin, May 23 1933

My final piece of work before I turned on the ‘out of office’ for Christmas was to return to some sources I accessed in the Leon Trotsky papers, now stored in Harvard, and partly digitised.

Among the documents I looked through were postcards sent to Leon Trotsky from Paul Kirchoff, a German revolutionary and anthropologist who spent part of the early 1930s working with the Harvard-Irish study.

One of Kirchoff’s letters to Trotsky from Ireland stood out because it opened with the Irish-language greeting ‘A Chara’, meaning ‘Dear friend’ (more-or-less). It was sent in May 1933 and is otherwise written in German:

I don’t have any deep analysis of this document for you.

I just found it unusual and interesting to imagine Leon Trotsky, sitting in his study in exile in Istanbul, reading a letter with the cúpla focal. The card also had an image of the Dublin Botanic Gardens on the front. How lovely.

A Chara, let this post be my own Christmas card to you, wherever you are reading it.

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Enjoy the break and see you again in 2024 🎄

Your friend,

Maurice