Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 175This may indeed be true to a certain extent, but his wholehearted
belief in this conviction and in the effacement of the historical and
material implications involved in his international work have unde-
niably harmful consequences.
The ideals that underpin Levov’s neoliberal convictions, which
are most visibly conveyed by his employment of unskilled black
and foreign laborers, are no doubt admirable, but they also rely on,
and thereby encourage, the existence of material inequality, which,
of course, cuts through all ethnic lines. Not only are we thereby
presented with what Eagleton calls “admirable ideals [... in a soci-
ety... ] that is structurally incapable of realizing them,” but also
with admirable ideals whose shortcomings are insidiously and trag-
ically obscured.^94
Another ideal, the implementation of which can be destructive
to the sociocultural fabric, and which has also been associated with
a flawed utopian vision, is orthodox Marxian Communism. In I
Married a Communist , Ira Ringold embraces Communist theory
and ideology with a stoic conviction that makes destruction seem-
ingly inevitable. Indeed, as Shostak points out, the tragic drive of the
novel’s plot is Ringold’s desire “to live a life of exemplary political
purity.”^95 This simplistic “purity” of thought and purpose reaches
such proportions so as to distort the protagonist’s capacity to appre-
ciate the nuances of society, culture, and politics, which cannot be
neatly integrated into his rigid Marxian framework. As his elder
brother, Murray, tells Zuckerman, Ringold’s “mind moved [... ]
not with clarity [but] only with force” (p. 86). Such lapses of clar-
ity (and indeed the misguiding influence of overly rigid ideological
convictions) are visible in a number of scenes in the novel. When
Murray expresses concern about Ringold’s precarious marriage with
Eve Frame, the latter quite tellingly resorts to explaining his motives
in the vocabulary of populist Marxism. “Look,” he tells Murray, “I
don’t live on Lehigh Avenue [... ] I’m not myself interested in the
bourgeois Jewish marriage with the two sets of dishes. I never lived
inside the bourgeois conventions and I have no intention of starting
now” (p. 86). Ringold’s response to the question about his marriage
thus involves integrating the topic within the schema of class divi-
sion. As well as dismissing a genuine display of familial concern,