If I Told You Once
   Judy Budnitz
  2000 Picador/St. Martin's Press NY USA
   ISBN: 0312202857


Ilana yearns to leave the poverty of her Eastern European village, to embark on a voyage to the New World. Upon her escape she is met by evil, magic & good fortune.

This is a wild, modern Brothers Grimm tale replete with magic, mayhem, progroms & wondrous creatures & people. A brother who is half wolf, a lover who is wholly enchanting & a mother who is entirely feral.

If I Told You Once begins with Ilana, a village girl from somewhere where snow blankets the earth nine months in a year & mud for the rest. Where crooked houses meet gray laden clouds & all the wives are cut from the same dull cloth, the husbands ferment a colorless liquor to brighten their lives & everyone eats gray bread.

People have few possessions - perhaps a goat, a handful of chickens, a teapot & cats so ugly they could kill mice merely by looking at them. Ilana was born into violent times, into a winter that froze the unwary before he could return from doing his private business & where bad luck stalked every doorway, every alleyway.

In those days bandits roamed & robbed with impunity, then soldiers looted what little was left & there were strange creatures in the deep forest that surrounded them.

Out collecting herbs for her mother, Ilana comes across a stranger dressed in colors she's never seen before. She is no simpleton & when he begins to inveigle himself upon her, she thwarts him, stealing a curious golden egg inside of which is a tiny scene of glorious wealth.

In those days, there were stories about mad people & the madness of the land. Children pulled infants from hapless mothers & daughters were sold to husbands for a handful of coins. Somewhere in the forest, something is eating the boys who go out to collect wood.

In time Ilana runs away, knowing there is somewhere where life has more to offer. In her flight she comes across a hovel in the forest & is drawn into the web of a local mad woman who has imprisoned the most beautiful women in the world. Ilana frees the footless beauty & carries her into the forest until they meet up with a man in a cart & the beauty chooses to go with him. Alone again, Ilana sets out for the horizon only to stumble upon her own little village. The familiar & loathed houses now only smoldering piles of burnt stumps & her parents massacred.

In despair & fear, Ilana starts walking again, her golden egg sewn into the hem of a petticoat, bangs against her legs. In time she comes to a town by the sea & finds work in the home of a woman artist who has painted a portrait of every one of her husbands. Each time she rides off to her country estate & leaves her husband behind, she forbids him entry to only one room in the huge house. Naturally, each husband disobeys her & meets his gory demise.

One day, Ilana gets lost in the winding streets of town & finds herself in a crowded building, watching the most alarming & breath-taking vision of her life. It is a play & the actor who plays the hero falls in love with her & together they flee to the sea & take a ship to the promised land.

In the land of milk & honey, she again knows only poverty, this time of the immigrant. It is her love for her husband & her twin sons that transforms her life & when her daughter is born, unwanted & unloved, the story passes on.

Each page of Judy Budnitz's If I Told You Once is rich with visions, thoughts & little wisdoms, so much so that I was surprised to find how thin the book actually was. Its images lingered long in my memory like those children's stories we read so long ago.

This is not a gentle little story, yet there is an innocence, a wonder & a remarkable change in perspective.

A profound transformational work of values, honor, madness & reality. A work of art, in a language that is haunting & immediate. If I Told You Once, is destined to become a classic in women's literature. Very well done!
(01/14/01)

Rebecca