Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 159So, given the genuine magnanimity involved in his work, Levov
feels depressed to see a steady decline in morale and dedication in
the factory, with increasing “negligence and indifference on the part
of his employees, [and] a marked decline in workmanship that had
the effect of sabotage even if he couldn’t call it that” (p. 163). The
impact of organized labor also impinges upon the profitability of the
entire enterprise, with “the unions [making] it more and more diffi-
cult for a manufacturer to make any money” (p. 24). When factories
like Newark Maid begin to shut down to move production abroad,
the resulting unemployment, combined with a steady influx of poor,
disenfranchised blacks from the South, sparks a series of protracted
and violent race riots. After finally closing the factory six years later,
Levov explains his decision, reasoning that the city was “butchered
to death by taxes, corruption, and race” and has since become a
“gruesome” place of murder, theft and mindless violence (p. 24).
He then reflects on the demise of Newark’s industries from its
“heyday” in the 1930s and bemoans the current state of moral and
social degeneracy:
When my father bought the factory, there were trolley cars on Central
Avenue. Further down were the auto showrooms. Central Cadillac.
LaSalle. There was a factory where somebody was making something
in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every street—a liquor
store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church. [... ] The major
industry now is car theft. (p. 25)Faced with such increasing levels of violence (to which he him-
self falls victim) and social degradation, Levov resigns himself to
the fate that he must close the factory and, like most of the other
industries in Newark, relocate it overseas. What is important to note
here, and is further instantiated in the argument below, is the con-
ceptual disconnection between the violent social decline of the city
and the underlying, historically produced system of material depri-
vation, inequality, and instability (an instability that his exit from
the city will only exacerbate). In the words of Fredric Jameson, the
underlying causes that bring about this decline are “relegated to the
marginalized category of the merely [... ] contingent or the rigor-
ously nonmeaningful.”^68 Levov’s disinclination to identify material