Amazon.com Review
Judy Budnitz's debut novel,
If I Told You Once, introduces us to Ilana, a peasant girl living sometime at the beginning of the 20th century, in an unnamed European town so gray that "the color of an egg yolk is something of a miracle." This is a place as timeless and vivid as fairy tales, with figures from Russian folklore cast against real-world horrors like rape, cannibalism, and genocide.
Not to say that all is gloomy in Budnitz's world. That's certainly not the case for Ilana, who is inspired to escape her environs for America, the only place with an actual name in the whole book. Here, Ilana's voyage turns into an immigrant's story of poverty, love, and loss. Budnitz also abandons much of the magical realism that fuels her tale's first 100 pages. What replaces the nonstop parade of wonders is a narrative device--suddenly the story is told from the point of view of Ilana's daughter, Sashie; then by Sashie's daughter, Mara; and finally by Nomie, Mara's niece.
As each woman speaks her mind on the American experience and the wounds of the heart, what emerges is a multi-generational saga that not only traverses time and geography, but sensibility as well. The novel is so well paced that the four narrators manage to keep up with the times without having to lean too heavily on cultural benchmarks like world events, slang, and references to pop songs. Budnitz's method is much more integrated, gently conveying a sense of time and tradition slipping away.
Even as Sashie and Mara dismiss the magical stories of Ilana's youth as fabrications, these tales resonate through a novel of great mythic weight. Here, nothing less than the modern world is ushered into being through the voices of girls who become lovers, lovers who become wives, and wives who become mothers. Miracles, indeed. --Ryan Boudinot
From Publishers Weekly
This disquieting debut novel from the author of the praised short story collection Flying Leap singes itself artfully into the imagination with its hard-edged, folktale-influenced exploration of the fate of four generations of women in Eastern Europe and America. During WWI, young Ilana vows to escape her village, surrounded by bandits and timber wolves, and the life (continual pregnancies, hard physical labor) she is certain to inherit. Braving a cold, surreal world where wolves walk on their hind legs and severed feet turn up by the side of the road, she finds shelter with the witchlike healer Baba before meeting Shmuel, a musician who tells her about America. Together, Shmuel and Ilana flee their unnamed, devastated country for a new life in New York City. While Shmuel works as a musician and actor, Ilana cares for their twin boys and daughter, Sashie. Like her mother, Ilana favors the boys and neglects Sashie, reinforcing a pattern of fierce love and self-destruction that will be adopted by Sashie; Sashie's daughter, Mara; and Sashie's son's daughter, Nomie: "They are treading in circles in their in-looking lives, circles within circles, getting smaller and smaller until soon they will be spinning in place." As these women mourn the fates of the men they've glorified (Ilana's twin sons are killed in WWII, Sashie's husband is unfaithful, Mara's brother falls in love with the wrong woman), each telling her own story in short, alternating sections, the line between fantasy and reality blurs. Finally Ilana, through Nomie, resolves to break the cycle of madness. Budnitz's hypnotic prose, as tight as a coiled spring, dream imagery (both poetic and fierce) and instinct for the grotesque cast a weird light on familiar subject matter, and owe as much to Isaac Bashevis Singer's early demon-haunted fables as to contemporary multigenerational sagas. Although eventually the emotionally dark atmosphere may enervate the reader, the novel has a haunting power. Agent, Leigh Feldman at Darhansoff and Verrill. Author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
