Love and marriage in Boro Park.
Sima's Undergarments for Women, by liana Stanger-Ross. Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press. 2009. 320 pages. $24.95.Ilana Stanger-Ross's deeply affecting debut novel delivers sharp insights into love, marriage, and relationships between mothers and daughters. Deftly plotted and vividly written, the novel engages from beginning to end. Even what at first seems like a crucial misstep--an apparently timid, crowd-pleasing ending--reveals a subtle, elegant ambiguity.
Sima Goldner is the aging owner of a women's undergarment store run out of the basement of her Boro Park home. As the novel opens, she is overcome by the beauty of a young Israeli tourist who has come to the store to buy bras. Despite hints of homoeroticism throughout the book, Sima's attraction to Timna is maternal. Married at an early age, Sima was never able to conceive, a source of grief and estrangement from her husband, Lev. Timna is staying with cousins in the neighborhood, waiting for her boyfriend, Alon, to be discharged from the Israel Defense Forces. She asks Sima for a job as a seatnstress. Taken by her beauty, feeling protective of a twenty-one-year old on her own in New York City, and needing a seamstress, Sima hires her.
Sima soon becomes heavily invested in playing Timna's mother. As Sima's attachment to Timna strengthens, she projects her own feelings of frustration with her loveless (and sexless) marriage onto Timna, idealizing Timna's relationship with Alon. When Sima suspects that Timna is pregnant, she secretly riffles through Timna's address book to find the phone number of an Israeli man with whom Timna, to Sima's disapproval, has been spending a lot of time. When Timna learns of this, the women's relationship is permanently altered.
Sima realizes that she is living vicariously through Timna, that she wants Timna and Alon to have the storybook marriage that she so anxiously desired but failed to build. As Timna points out, Sima is unable to change her own situation, despite her unhappiness with it, remaining with Lev mostly out of fear of growing old alone. Timna believes that Sima's feverish interest in Timna and Alon's staying together is born of that same fear.
The book alternates sections unfolding in the present with parts that chronicle Sima's struggle with infertility as a young woman in the early 1960s. Regret, resentment, and shame grip her, souring her marriage, and making her involvement in Timna's life both understandable and pathetic--as Sima herself recognizes. The intercutting sections work effectively, as each leap back into the past sketches out a bit more of the circumstances that led to the present, resulting in a rich, convincing portrait of how Sima came to be who she is. The picture of Boro Park, in transition from a mixed secular and Orthodox neighborhood to a predominantly Hasidic one, also feels true, and the author makes just enough--but not too much--of the fact that Sima's profession puts her in uncomfortably close proximity to the intimate details of the neighborhood's extremely fertile women.
Sima is so sharply and sympathetically drawn that it is almost impossible not to root for her, even when the reader cringes as she intrudes on Timna's privacy. Indeed, part of Sima's appeal is her simultaneous ability to recognize this intrusiveness and her inability to prevent it. When Sima tells Lev that they must intervene to help Timna, Lev suggests that Sima secretly wants Timna as the daughter, and the suspected baby as the granddaughter, that she never had. "Even as she dismissed it, her heart jumped at the thought--a baby, Timna--but she swallowed, pushed the longing deep down." [219]
Stanger-Ross is not afraid to exhibit Sima's flaws, such as her selfishness and cruelty to Lev. For nearly fifty years, she failed to tell Lev that the reason for her inability to conceive lay in a venereal disease that she contracted from another boy when she was sixteen. The refusal to confide in Lev, as much as her own unhappiness at being childless, eroded their relationship over time. His regret at her never sharing this secret and thus allowing the possibility of confronting and reconciling themselves to each other and to their childlessness, moves her to a selfish rage: "It was the cruelest of all, his regret. She was the one who regretted, she was the one who mourned--never Lev, never before." [186]
That an ordinary middle-class woman raised Orthodox in 1940s and '50s Brooklyn would have difficulty discussing with her husband pre-marital sex she had had with another man shades Sima's decision, making it sociologically and psychologically plausible. And it is all the more poignant because Sima is known as a straight-talker. She fingers Art, her best friend Connie's husband, for cheating on Connie with his secretary: when Art comments how much he loves on Connie a certain bra that Connie does not own, Sima supplies the answer to Connie's plaintive question "who bought the bra?": Art's secretary. Connie immediately banishes Art from her life.
The theme of fading love is certainly well-worn. But Stanger-Ross charts its decline with skill, effortlessly moving between the past and present, as the first, easy phase of infatuation yields to something less attractive, making the topic seem fresh. The novel's precise prose adds punch to its insights:
Sima smiled. She knew Timna loved this: the easy frustration with Alon, the chiding. Most women did at first, when they strived to know everything, about their beloved, delighting in his bright-edged outline even as they sighed over differences, faults, thinking that, after all, the weaknesses just pointed to the ways they were needed, like a new mother who, complaining that the baby screams every time she gives it to someone else, thrills nonetheless to those cries that signal her worth. But of course it all changed, the small faults that teased the love growing into gaps, missing pieces that left you one day looking at a face, searching for what you'd loved mad finding it empty. [75]
At its most exhilarating, reading a good novel is like standing thigh-deep in the surf at a beach noted for dangerous rip tides: beneath the waves pushing you toward the reassuring safety of shore there lurks the possibility of a sudden, swift pull out to the wild deep. At first glance, the book's ending seems surprisingly tame, especially given its clear-eyed treatment of love. Timna and Alon, who have broken up, reconcile and decide to meet in Los Angeles. Timna buys a one-way ticket, making a clean break from Sima, as was bound to happen one day. This leads Sima to take stock of her life, and she realizes that she must put her longings and regrets behind her and enjoy life as she has found it. She promptly cuts down on her hours at the store and takes a two-week road trip with Lev to Nova Scotia--a notion that she had entertained on their New England honeymoon but which they had not pursued.
I came to love Sima and wished her all the happiness possible. At the stone time, coming to terms with her delusions about Timna taking the place of a child, and riding off into the sunset with her husband, seemed too pat, as if the author was angling for the Oprah seal of approval. Life is messier. The novel strongly suggests that Connie and An will get back together, unable to completely redirect the arc of their lives. I found it hard to believe that Sima and Lev could break out of a forty-plus-year funk as easily as they seemed to. Yet on rereading the ending I was struck by the aptness of its ambiguity: in the final scene Sima and Lev gaze out at the fog-shrouded ocean, an image that captures both the vast longing and the uncertainty of love.
JOEL STREICKER is a critic and translator living in San Francisco. His reviews have appeared in Midstream, The Forward, Shofar, and other publications, and his translations of Latin American literature have been published in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, The Bitter Oleander, and other magazines.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Streicker, Joel |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Midstream |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2011 |
| Words: | 1336 |
| Previous Article: | The late Lieberman. |
| Next Article: | In praise of Midstream. |
| Topics: | |