Content area
Full Text
Erica Johnson Debeljak. Forbidden Bread: A Memoir. Berkeley, California. North Atlantic (Random House, distr.). 2009. 288 pages. $15.95. isbn 978-1- 55643-740-3
Edmund Wilson called F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel "a romance and a reading list." Forbidden Bread is a romance and a cultural history in which Erica Debeljak works her way, simultaneously, into a marriage and a new country newly liberated from Yugoslavia and also struggling to discover itself.
The personal and political are interwoven. At independence, Slovenia suddenly changed from being "the perennially dull and diligent "A" student in a variously backward and brilliant, barren, and abundant union" to "the poor and dangerous neighbor of a jittery European Union." On emigrating to Slovenia and marrying one of its best-known poets, Debeljak lost her status as a successful financial analyst in New York and became a foreigner...