Sima's Undergarments for Women

I love love love this book, I couldn't put it down! It's beautifully written, alternating the humor and the tragedy of lives lived. Stanger-Ross has crafted rich, genuine characters - I felt Sima's silent emotional struggle as though it were my own, while Timna felt like so many young women I have known.

Sima is a local wonder in her tiny basement lingerie shop, where "in a glance she could see their size, the back and the cup combined. '36-D,' she'd say ... In vain the women protested, 'but I'm a 34. I've always been.' [But] when on her advice they slipped back on their shirts to evaluate the shape a new bra gave, they inevitably agreed." Her loyal customers rely on her to fit them, their sisters and their daughters with the perfect show more underwear while at the same time hearing their joys and sorrows and providing meaningul advice. This role has been Sima's for so long that she has completely forgotten how to think about her own problems, her own needs -- until Timna arrives, a breath of fresh air for the shop and the daughter that Sima and her sad husband Lev never had.

Watching Timna explore New York and her own freedom and youth, Sima is forced to examine her own life and the secrets and shames she has held since adolescence - and ultimately to accept her husband and begin the task of rebuilding their love. With graceful, unselfconscious prose Stanger-Ross brings to life the hidden stories all around us. I give this book a rousing 5 stars -- read it and you'll want to share it with all the women in your life. show less

This book goes so much further than the synopsis captures, though it is hard to say too much about that without spoilers. In the very beginning, it was hard to connect with Sima, but the narrative quickly reveals the depths of her pain and her tragedy. I though this would be a novel about friendship, but it isn't really- it is a story about love and loss and small decisions that have lasting consequences.

Stanger-Ross has created a moving tale of one woman's battle with infertility, and as Sima's story unfolds, my heart ached for her. This is sad book, a picture of how easy it is to withdraw from life and love, and how hard it is to ever make your way back. I highly recommend this book; four strong stars.

I have a bit of a love/like with this book. At first, this is what I said about the book:

I feel like a mid-Victorian prude! I started reading Sima's Undergarments for Women and found the relationship between the two women more than a little creepy. It's not quite mother/daughter, not out-and-out lesbianism, but something a little more covert. I had to put it down and post the question: Should I read this? Have any of you read it, and can you shed any light?

A friend of mine read the book and told me that I was all wrong on it, and that I should get past this odd beginning (she agreed that it was written with a creepy vibe at first) and get to the nitty gritty of the relationship between the older and younger women.

I read on, and she was show more correct. Once I got past the initial reaction, I saw a terribly lonely, guilty and overbearing woman. I was so sorry for the way she handled her inability to have children, how it affected her marriage and her relationship with the younger Timna. She eventually pushed them away despite the fact that she needed them both. And the relationship that Timna and Lev forged with one another on the shared foundation of Sima was interesting. I also loved the Jewish element to the story. While I am not Jewish, I can imagine that this is exactly what many families of the faith are like.

I found this to be a very real, heart-wrenching story of loss, regret, and almost-too-late second chances. The characters are real, the friendships are real and the neighborhood is real. Recommended. show less

Sima misses her youth and the happy start of her marriage. Timna, a young, attractive Israeli woman works helps Sima sell underwear, corsets, robes and more re-invigorating Sima's unsatisfying life. Working with Timna becomes a much needed focussed adventure for Sima. She absorbs Timna's beauty, her stories and follows her after work!

Timna is both: a representation of Sima's missed opportunities, and the daughter she never had.
Timna helps Sima gain clarity about her marriage and learn how to proactively move forward.

Strongly good read!

A good story—written by, say, Lorraine Hansbury or Amy Tan—invites the reader into an unfamiliar world. Ilana Stanger-Ross grew up in Brooklyn; her novel concerns a not-very-practicing Jewish woman in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. Sima Goldner owns a shop in her basement and sells bras, panties, bustiers, robes, everything a woman needs for support and beauty. Able to recognize sizes 28A to 52K, Sima knows what her customers (almost all of them Orthodox women) need. But in a culture that values children more than almost anything else on earth, Sima is barren. Her marriage is barren. Flashbacks reveal how she and her husband Lev, a retired teacher, tried to have children, how Sima went through countless fertility tests. She show more failed, the marriage began to fail, and love dried up. Sima isn’t even polite to Lev anymore. He hides in the newspaper.
And now Timna walks into Sima’s shop, Timna, who is an Israeli tourist, who is engaged to an Israeli soldier, who is unbelievably beautiful. Sima needs an assistant, Timna needs a job. Sima falls head over heels in love with Timna. This is in no way lesbian love, however; it’s the love of a lonely, meddlesome woman for beauty. For life. For a surrogate child. Obsessed, Sima begins following Timna after she leaves the shop. For the first time in decades, she walks into other neighborhoods. She crosses the bridge into Manhattan and discovers that there’s a whole world outside her basement. “Such a little shop,” the author writes toward the end of the book. “Linoleum floor, polyester curtain, wooden shelves…. A hidden space, inconsequential, not even a pinprick on the borough map, but for [Sima], standing behind the counter with light coming through the one window, a whole world.” Sima is stepping into a brave new world.
Stanger-Ross has received prizes for her fiction, including a Timothy Findley Fellowship, and is currently a student-midwife on the University of British Columbia faculty. Her writing goes far beyond this Jewish neighborhood. It captures the universality of women’s longing, of painful truths, of gossip and betrayal, of forgiveness, of youth and age. This novel, which takes place in nine months, is hard to put down. At the beginning, Sima is bitter and Lev is silent. At the end, Timna is on her way to Los Angeles and Sima and Lev are on their way to a new beginning.

by Barbara Ardinger

Copyright ForeWord Magazine, Volume 12, no. 1 show less

Set in the Jewish-Orthodox neighborhood of Boro Park, New York, Sima's Undergarments for Women centers on Sima Goldner, an older woman who runs a lingerie shop in her basement, one of many such under-the-radar neighborhood businesses dotting this close community. Sima and her husband, Lev, are childless and entering late middle age locked in a tense relationship characterized by a lack of communication and a lack of warmth. The shop is Sima's domain, her escape, and her means of establishing relationships with her community.

Then one day, a beautiful young Israeli woman named Timna enters the shop. Newly arrived in America, Timna, who as it happens is a skilled seamstress, ends up working for Sima, doing alterations and selling lacy show more pretties to the customers. Sima is smitten with Timna and soon builds a vivid fantasy life around the quiet young lady, leading her to become ever more attached and involved in her life.

The story unfolds on a double time line- the present and the past comingling as Stanger-Ross takes the reader to the early days of Sima's marriage and her struggles with fertility. Sima is devastated that she cannot have children, and this sadness fuels her alienation from her husband and her involvement in work. Now, I understand that Sima's feelings towards Timna are supposed to come from her thwarted maternal instinct- Timna is supposed to represent a surrogate daughter. However, Sima's behavior- sniffing Timna's sweaters, obsessing over her love life, dressing up in a disguise and stalking her- strikes me as less maternal tenderness and more mental illness. Couple this with her bitterness and nasty coldness towards her husband, and, despite the personal tragedy of her infertility, she comes across as quite unpleasant.

So it's a problem when a novel hinges on your compassion for a character who's actually quite unhinged herself. Timna seems like a normal enough young woman- outgoing, busy, lots friends, with normal post-adolescent ups and downs with parents and boyfriends, but really almost all we know about her is that she's pretty and from Israel. Sima's husband Lev strikes me as the real tragic figure of the novel. He sits upstairs by himself all day, his loneliness relieved only by occasional visits from his wife's employee who comes up to share a cup of coffee and a little conversation, while his wife berates, belittles and humiliates him. Much of the novel's melodrama focuses on Sima's low self-esteem but Lev deserves a lot better than what he gets for most of the book, too.

On balance I think Stanger-Ross has written a good first novel, and I know a lot of other reviewers saw different things in it than I did, and I respect that. I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone else from giving it a go who's interested in women's or Jewish-interest fiction but for me it was hard to like only because Sima was so hard to like. What I like best about Sima's Undergarments for Women is the way Stanger-Ross has created a microcosm of womens' lives and moods and feelings. It's a neighborhood shop filled with different kinds of families, women and men, where all kinds of personal and domestic dramas are played out over what bra to buy- weddings, bat mitzvahs, training bras, bras to show off in, bras to hide in, bras for comfort and fashion and fun. And her lead characters, Sima and Timna, certainly exemplify the many stages and permutations of a woman's life as well.

you can also see my review at my blog at: http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2009/02/review-simas-undergarments-for-women-by... show less

Sima Goldner owns the shop into which Timna, new to Brooklyn, wanders. Sima's seamstress is leaving and Timna needs a job, and a relationship is born. It's not a simple work relationship, though: Sima comes to love Timna as the daughter she was never able to have. Told from Sima's point of view, the story alternates between the present day and bits and pieces of Sima's past.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, polishing it off in less than 24 hours. Bit by bit, Sima's relationships unfold before you: with Timna, with Connie, Sima's best friend, and with Lev, Sima's husband. I felt so much sympathy for Sima as she mothered Timna and revisited her own youth. Her strained relationship with Lev, though, is the one that affected me most, and show more there's a touching lesson to be learned from them.

The ending to the novel is a bit abrupt, but I found it a sweet note on which to end. show less