Haaretz–January 6, 2009
Sima’s Undergarments for Women
by Ilana Stanger-Ross,
Overlook Press, 319 pages, $24.95
As the owner of a Brooklyn bra shop, Sima Goldner has seen breasts of all kinds– old and young, small and large, breasts with stretch marks, breasts pained by breastfeeding, even the scars left over by breasts that have been removed. But she has never seen breasts as perfect as those of Timna, the young Israeli who wanders into her shop one day, arousing more than just an expert’s curious eye. It is a moment in Ilana Stanger-Ross’s sentimental debut novel, “Sima’s Undergarments for Women,” that ends up having a lasting effect on the storeowner. Sima hires the young beauty as an in-house seamstress, but Timna provides a lot more than just her sewing talents. With tales of her romantic life, Timna manages to revive Sima, who has been numbed by the pain of infertility and a marriage that has long since soured.
For the last few decades, Sima has spent her days providing undergarments for women who bare their bodies and listening as they bare their souls in her basement store in the Orthodox neighborhood of Boro Park. The shop– where most of the book’s narrative unfolds– serves as a space away from men, where women seek solidarity. In the privacy of the dressing rooms, pregnancies are covered up and affairs are revealed; disappointments are aired and celebrations announced. Sima can eye a woman’s size on first glance — an important skill, since a good-fitting bra can make or break the way a woman feels about her body.
But for Sima, her work serves an additional purpose. It keeps her mind off her own body, which betrayed her years before. After countless attempts to get pregnant, Sima was forced to lay aside hopes of ever having a child. The shame this induced in her, along with a long-held secret from adolescence, led her to forsake both marital happiness and motherhood. She shuts out her husband, Lev — who is well-meaning if a bit inattentive — and surrenders to a life of lonely coexistence with him.
Sima’s troubled personal life comes to the fore with Timna’s arrival in Brooklyn. There the visitor lives with cousins and works while Alon, her boyfriend back home, finishes his army service. Like many Israelis, the two plan to travel when he’s done. Timna, who is in her early 20s, regales Sima with tales of her own romance as they size and fit the steady stream of women who come through the door. “Such romance in my shop, it gives me a reason to get up in the morning,” Sima tells a friend.
But what starts as innocent excitement quickly becomes infatuation. Like an overprotective mother or obsessive lover — she vacillates between the two — Sima follows Timna when she leaves the shop at the end of the day, repeatedly spying on her. Rather than work to repair the damage done to her own relationship, she tries to control Timna’s. Sima counsels her against breaking up with Alon, and is equally skeptical of anything that suggests Timna’s independence — she has reasons, revealed toward the end of the book, to fear that Timna will wind up like her, infertile and lonely.
That’s not to say Timna doesn’t benefit from Sima’s concern. Her relationship with her own mother is rocky, and she feels freed by the safety and comfort that Sima provides. She begins to explore Manhattan and the surrounding areas with a group of fellow Israelis, and eventually her explorations lead her back to herself. Doubts about her own relationship surface, to the disappointment of Sima, who can’t “allow another love to disappear.”
‘Stay out of my life’
This might just make for a more compelling read if it weren’t so predictable. Most of the narrative builds up to a dramatic confrontation between the two women, but a combination of factors make that moment — and much of this book’s intended momentum — fall flat. “Stay out of my life, Sima, and look at your own instead,” Timna finally says. Her admonishment is meant to serve as the book’s turning point, but comes across as melodramatic. What’s more, it comes as no surprise. We have long recognized Sima’s obsession with Timna for what it is — a means to experience a vicarious existence through this young, presumably fertile, woman, whose future holds what Sima’s life has lacked — and don’t need to be told this in such explicit terms.
No less tiresome is the book’s tone. Though the voice is assured, it feels overly sentimental ? as is the depiction of Timna, who comes off as little more than a narrative tool, a sweet and sexy foil to Sima, but ultimately one-dimensional.
The bra shop at the center of the book is modeled after a real store in Boro Park, the author says in an online interview. Originally from Brooklyn, the 33-year-old Stanger-Ross lives today in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studies midwifery. She was taken to the Brooklyn shop by her mother to buy her first bra, and returned later in her 20s as a semi-regular customer. The book, she says, is a kind of homage to that store, which closed a few years ago, while the author was working toward her M.F.A. at Temple University in Philadelphia.
The choice of setting may be enough to limit the book’s audience from the outset, though the author says she hopes the novel won’t be pigeonholed as chick lit. “Fiction centered on women’s lives can be both entertaining and profound,” she explains.
But it is unlikely that many men will make it past the first couple of pages, though they are sure to enjoy titillating descriptions of Timna’s breasts. That said, many women may also be turned off. Though the book is clearly meant to take place some time in the present, Sima is old-fashioned and seems out of place in a contemporary setting, due in part to her limited worldview. It has been years since she ventured into Manhattan, let alone seen other parts of the world. There is one mention of “the war,” which we can assume to be the war with Iraq, but the characters seem utterly oblivious to the world outside the basement bra shop. One suspects the author intends the store to be perceived as a world of its own, small but intimate. This would be fine if the book didn’t suffer from the same limitations that its characters seem to have. It’s one thing to describe the parochial world of a bra-shop owner, but less interesting is a book that suffers from that very same parochialism.
Though once a mixed neighborhood, Boro Park has grown increasingly ultra-Orthodox over the last few decades. Stanger-Ross would have us believe that the bra shop provides a safe space where women feel free to open up. But safe from what? Ross glosses over any religious tensions one would expect to arise between residents or among the store’s mixed clientele. As it is, the book?s setting seems to serve as no more than a literary crutch — it’s suggestive of a secretive, closed world, but never gets explored beyond the surface.
The same is true of Timna’s nationality. Stanger-Ross relies on stereotypes of Israelis — she is sexy, and came to the United States to make money — but doesn’t delve any deeper into Israeli identity or the Israeli-Diaspora divide. Stanger-Ross doesn’t touch on what living among the ultra-Orthodox might be like for Timna, who looks like “the women on the covers of drugstore romances,” nor on what it might mean for religious customers to interact with her in the bra shop.
Having said that, the book is not without merits. Stanger-Ross treats Sima’s infertility with a degree of complexity otherwise missing from the rest of the book. Shamed by her body’s failure and her secret, she punishes herself by putting up barriers. The sweet but boring Lev makes efforts to bring Sima closer, but she has been deeply damaged. In a touching moment between the couple, Sima bares the “round swell of her stomach” and her “pale flesh.” “This is all I have, is this what you want?” she asks.
Detached from her own body, Sima looks to Timna’s youthful figure to revive her sensuality. Desire is complicated, more so than we usually acknowledge, and Stanger-Ross is skillful in addressing its complexity. Sima, it seems, is neither a latent lesbian nor does she seem to want to act out her erotic feelings ? her attraction is simply wrapped up in other feelings Sima has for her young employee: the desire to mother her, and at the same time to be her.
“Sima thrilled to the swirl of her nipple,” we are told when she first meets Timna. Her fascination with Timna’s body is never put to rest, and by the end of the book she imagines the “softness” of Timna’s body, “the promise of it,” as she masturbates.
As the novel concludes, Sima finds a way back to her own estranged body, and we understand that this may serve as a first step in a longer process of self-acceptance. Alone in her shop, she traces her body with her fingers to discover it anew. Sima “gripped the banister with one hand, and let herself remember with the other, holding on until she felt the shudder.”
These moments of sophistication, albeit wrapped in language that can be cliched, come as a welcome relief in a book that otherwise feels frustratingly affected. Where other contemporary novels suffer from being overly cynical or ironic, “Sima’s Undergarments for Women” suffers from too much sentimentality.
