Erica Johnson DebeljakBesprekingen

52/2020. I'm predisposed towards empathy for my fellow human beings and generally enjoy memoirs (provided they don't wilfully twist events to other people's detriment) but this author truly lived down to the worst spoiled wealthy USian stereotypes.

Reading notes: The author comes across as a very parochial USian who is narrow-mindedly accustomed to assuming her class and nation are the bestest evah and is incapable of any wider understanding, which is especially astonishing when one considers that this book was published over fifteen years after the events discussed.

She compares Slovenia to a "totalitarian state" because it takes ten days and several visits to sort out the paperwork for her wedding, as an English-speaking foreign national, to a Slovenian. I wonder if she's ever given even one second's thought to the same paperwork in the US, her country of origin, for anyone who can't buy their way through the corrupt bureaucracy by throwing lawyers etc at it. She also complains about not being able to immediately book the precise place and time of her wedding with only a few weeks notice despite New Yorkers who want a particular venue often have to book many months in advance.

She complains about needing thirty hours of driving instruction before she can acquire a driving licence because she believes the zero instruction she claims was required in the US is bettererer, although traffic fatalities in the US are about 50% higher than in comparable countries.

She boggles at the idea of allotments, and urban farms, where people in Ljubljana grow food, because apparently she's never ever encountered this globally widespread practice before. She calls allotment sheds a "shanty town".

Then she expresses her horror at Slovenians' "cruel" eight hour working days from 6am to 2pm when they still have daylight for shopping or leisure (or tending allotments), which is bizarre because if childcare was as available as in Slovenia then I know many people who'd jump at the chance of those working hours. But apparently only the urban USian middle class 9 to 5 is acceptable to her (not that she or her husband are expected to work 6am to 2pm or any eight hour shift).

Neither the author nor her editor know the difference between proscription and conscription. Likewise fauna and flora.

Her frame of reference for the end of the Second World War is "Marshall Plan-bearing Americans or raping and looting Russians", so she appears wholly unaware of US troops famously looting enormous quantities of Nazi gold or the extremely well-known USian movie Kelly's Heroes based on real life looting, and also unaware of the sex-trafficking by USian troops in Europe (including girls under any age of consent), although when I say US troops I of course mean white US troops because African-American troops behaviour was demonstrably superior (presumably due to being under threat from their own nation and military in addition to the official enemy).

Admits she's probably too lazy to spend one day a year tending a few family graves. I mean, congrats on the self-awareness but....

In an extended discussion of health, maternity, and baby care she expresses her laughable belief that US culture's "folk wisdom" is "science and rationality, individual freedom, and the pursuit of happiness." About a country where medical professionals traditionally mutilate baby boys' genitalia on the grounds that USian parents can't be trusted to teach their boy children basic hygiene. She also denigrates Slovenian "folk wisdom" such as the scientifically true understanding that being cold makes humans more vulnerable to viral respiratory infection, and mocks what appear to be measures to prevent congenital hip dysplasia (or something similar) in a susceptible population by using a particular shape of baby clothes. The author apparently thinks she knows better than the medical establishment which, to be fair, could come under "individual freedom" but which is incompatible with her claim to "science and rationality".

I refuse to deconstruct this but she refers to USian-style toilet bowls as "a normal flush toilet".

And the crowning glory of parochial prejudice: "I want my baby to be an optimistic can-do American, not a defeatist death obsessed European".

Imagine having that for a daughter-in-law!

Currently reading my way around the European Union.

Reading: Slovenia.

Read: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden.

Remaining unread countries: Croatia, Czechia, Latvia.

A quite good memoir. The author, a financial analyst in New York City, threw caution to the wind when she married a Slovenian poet and moved to his brand-spanking-new country in 1993. She didn't know anyone else there and didn't speak Slovenian, and the war in Bosnia was going on close enough that they could hear it. Nevertheless, the transition was a success.

Debeljak fell in love with her adopted county and writes about it beautifully and with good-natured humor -- both its good parts and its bad. There was, for example, the horrible bureaucracy left over from the Communist days, as well as the hostility Slovenians held towards "southerners" (other Yugoslavs). But there was the gorgeous landscape, and the hardworking and thrifty inhabitants, and of course her husband and his family who accepted this foreigner as their own.

This is an awesome book if you want to know about daily life in Slovenia. I think it would also appeal to all immigrants, from and to anywhere. The culture shock is universal.

Wonderful read, I felt as if I was there with Erica making her transition from her old life to her new, struggling with language, customs and all the tiny but important things that come with moving to a new country. I will recommend this book to all my book loving friends.

In 1991, Erica Johnson was an investment analyst living in New York city when she met a dark-haired Slovenian poet, Ales Debeljak. On their first date, Ales made it clear that he intended to return to Slovenia in three-months time, and that he would not let any "forbidden bread" (i.e. forbidden fruit or in this case, Erica) derail his plans. The looming expiration date aside, the two began a relationship, with neither one knowing exactly where it was headed. A break-up and make-up later, Ales, true to his word, returns to Slovenia; Erica promises to call and visit, and take things one step at a time.

Despite the initial pitfalls of very-long distance relationship, Ales proposed in 1993 and Erica made the radical decision to leave her job, her family, and her friends and move to Slovenia. In the early 90's, Slovenia was a country that very few Americans ever heard of. Gaining its independence from the former Yugoslavia in a ten-day war, Slovenia was struggling to modernize and enter the twentieth century with meager resources. Not surprisingly, Erica's decision was greeted with puzzled looks, questions like "Where is that?" and warnings from her Eastern European friends about her future husband not lifting a finger.

Married to Ales in October of 1993, Erica embarked on a journey of discovering a radically different culture. With farms in the middle of the city and entertainment consisting of three bars, Ljubjana (the capital of Slovenia) was light years apart from New York City. Erica was often looked at as the silly American who did not understand customs (or more often old wives' tales) like wearing slippers inside a home to prevent ailments, or triple-diapering a baby to avoid strange leg deformities. She often felt lonely and detached from the people around her, but took her new surroundings in stride. Erica learned Slovenian, dealt with the remnants of Soviet bureaucracy and most importantly, came to appreciate and enjoy the country that was now her home.

As described by Publisher's Weekly, "Forbidden Bread" is at once "a love letter to Erica's husband and an introduction to the Slovenian world". Part a reverse mail-order bride story, part a history/geography lesson, and part a family account, "Forbidden Bread" is above all a tribute to the lengths people go to for love.

A memoir. Erica falls in love with Ales (pronounced Alesh) while he is in American studying and moves to Slovenia to marry him. Life in Slovenia is very different from life in America.

I kept picking up and putting down this books in between other reads. I'm still not sure if it was the book or I just wasn't in the mood for this book at this time. I did like the book well enough. But I started reading it just before I got seriously sick and the resulting testing to try to find out what it was, which put me out of commission for about two months and had me not reading much at all. So I can't say that might not have factored in. Perhaps if I'd started the book without all that going on, I'd have read it straight through and formed a different opinion of it. All that said, it took me over a month to read the bulk of the book post-illness so it might well have been the book. I just wanted to be sure to disclaim.

More so in the beginning of the book, the chapters seem to follow the following format. Erica would begin a chapter by relating an event in her life briefly, then digress into related but unnecessary information about the topic and Slovenian life. Sometimes this was just a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes it was pages of details. Then she would return to the incident and related it in greater detail. I found the digressions a distraction from her story and sometimes hard to follow if one wasn't up-to-date on the recent past history of that geographical area. I would have much rather she just gave more depth and details about these experiences and her feelings on living in a new and very foreign country. The book was drifting there towards the end.

I feel the book could have also benefited from a map or maps of the area and maybe the area as it was in the recent past as well as a map of the city she lived in. There were often mentions of geographical details, cities, and other locations. Seeing it in map form would have made reading it clearer to me. It felt like the book would read easier to someone familiar with the area.

There was also a lot of information about the recent history of Slovenia. It was not simple explanations to increase understanding of the story. It was detailed information that seemed hard keep up with without a decent prior knowledge of recent Slovenian history. It felt unneeded.

I should add that I hated the author's use of the term poet-lover. She seemed to intend it as endearing and cute but it came off as pretentious. This purely my opinion though.

Overall, I did find the parts of the book that were just the memoir interesting and wish she had just stuck to that. I found myself wishing that she'd written in more detail about her experiences and feelings. It felt like just the surface at times. I think if she'd given the level detail on those that she did on the geographical, historical, and cultural information, it would have been a better book.

One of the parts I enjoyed was Erica's explanations of the section headings: Singular, Dual, and Plural. Taken straight forwardly, these are Erica herself, as a couple, and as a family. But she relates a story about attending langauge classes. She has been in Slovenia for a little while by this time and she was finally beginning to feel like she was getting the hang of the language at last. Then the teacher teaches her class about the words for the singular, the dual, and the plural. But the plural only applies to three to five items then the singular use is used again, implying six or more items is a single group. Erica is frustrated by the continuing complexity of the language and the culture, especially when it doesn't make much logical sense. When she is ranting on the topic to Ales that evening, he talks about the beauty of using all the words for dual in writing poetry. The language takes on an aspect of beauty to her then and the section titles take on more meaning. I wish the book had contained more of the connection, complexity, depth of emotions, and detail of experience that this incident had.

Good½

Slovenia was a toddler of a country when Erica Johnson arrived there in 1993 to marry her black-haired poet lover, Aleš Debeljak. Slovenia had only won its independence from Yugoslavia two years earlier; war still raged in Croatia and Bosnia to the south. What was she thinking?

Johnson Debeljak answers that question in Forbidden Bread, her engrossing memoir about abandoning the life of a Manhattan commercial banker to move to a nascent post-communist state where most people still grew their own cabbage and considered themselves lucky to have a tiny Soviet car to drive. She uses her own story as the backdrop for Slovenia’s story, with its tumultuous history and rich, poetry-filled culture.

From her battles with power-abusing bureaucrats, to worries about bombs falling on her wedding, to ethnic jokes and fussing in-laws, Johnson Debeljak provides layers of detail that let the reader really understand what it would be like to live in a land so foreign. This is arm-chair travel at its best – a trip to the true heart of a country.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

What a treat this book turned out to be. The only reason I'm not giving it a full 5 stars is because it was slow to grab me. I even put it down once and picked up something else. I was afraid this was going to be a memoir all about emotional turmoil, when, in fact it's more of a love song to Slovenia. There's a lot of wry humor mixed with tenderness as the writer learns not only to live comfortably in her alien surroundings, but also learns to love her new homeland as well. Honestly, this is one region of the world I would never have even considered visiting before reading this book. Now I would love to see it!½

Erica Johnson Debeljak’s Forbidden Bread is the memoir of a New York financial analyst who leaves home to marry a poet from Slovenia and settle in his newly independent country. Although sometimes a little dry, generally speaking, the book is revealing about life in the tiny Eastern European nation. I particularly liked the description of the day Erica and her fiancé, Ales, decide upon the spot for their upcoming wedding. Hoping to impress Erica’s family, who are less than thrilled with her choice to move to the former Yugoslavia, they find a beautiful, fairytale castle for the wedding ceremony. The reception is to be held in a nearby restaurant. As the couple check out the restaurant by sampling a delicious meal, their romantic dinner is suddenly interrupted by shaking ground and loud blasts. When asked, the waiter apologizes profusely – it is the unfortunate and unpredictable war being fought over the border in Croatia, less than an hour away. Erica’s first question: Do they fight on Saturdays, too?

The descriptions of Slovenian bureaucracy, language, beliefs and old world customs make for interesting reading. The historical references interspersed throughout the memoir are fairly confusing, but I imagine that is because of the complexity of the history of the area. In the beginning of the book is a pronunciation guide that is helpful, and throughout the book are photographs that add to the enjoyment of the memoir. Given the fact that she spends pages describing the fact that her New York friends and colleagues had no idea WHERE Slovenia is, let alone anything about its culture, I am very surprised that Debeljak does not include a map or two in the book. That would have been helpful in understanding both her travels and the history of the region.

Let me begin this review with thanks to LibraryThing for providing me with the opportunity to read this wonderful book. The second thing is that my lifelong dream has been to be a Slovak peasant – knowing of course, as author Erica Johnson Debeljak discovers in her book Forbidden Bread that this group doesn’t exist in Central Europe with the romanticized vision I have in my head. But when Erica first moved to Slovenia with her lover and fiancé, the rural lifestyle and traditions were still common and she describes these with great detail.

To read the rest of this review, please visit LibrarysCatBooks½

Forbidden Bread is Erica Johnson Debeljak's memoir of moving to Slovenia to be with her boyfriend, poet Ales Debeljak. The book follows her journey and their relationship from its beginnings in New York City, when Erica, as an American, was considered "forbidden bread"- someone that Ales wasn't supposed to fall in love with. But fall in love he does, and she does too, and before long she's leaving it all behind to settle into the newly-minted country of Slovenia, fresh from its split from the former Yugoslavia.

The book is pleasant enough; the first few chapters read more like chick lit and it took me a while to settle into the flow of the narrative. Once she moves to Slovenia the book settles down, and we are treated to an entertaining if somewhat superficial fish-out-of-water story as Debeljak navigates bureaucracy, language lessons and more. I wouldn't call Forbidden Bread electrifying reading but it's pleasant enough and provides an interesting glimpse into the culture of a little-known country.

You can read my full review at my blog here: http://www.bostonbibliophile.com/2009/06/forbidden-bread-by-erica-johnson.html

In 1993, financial analyst Erica Johnson Debeljak makes a life altering move from her friends and her job in NYC to travel across a geographical and cultural divide to the new(ish) country of Slovenia, all in the name of love to her Slovenian poet that she met at a party in 1991.

Given this set-up, this book seems to hold promise of depicting struggle, culture shock, limitless love - any number of emotions that such an event can bring on in memoirs that someone feels important enough to share. And certainly there are some pockets in the a few chapters where I see more than just the superficial thoughts of an American in Slovenia. And I don't mean superficial in the American sense that she longs for toilets without inspection shelves, gourmet coffee, etc - but really that I do not feel I am taken into her deeper thoughts that such expected turmoil should provide. I feel that she glosses over areas of her life that I would love her to delve deeper in to. Tell me more about those first months in a cramped apartment while attending school to learn this very foreign language since you can not work there, tell me more about the students you encounter, tell me more about your shopping experiences as you begin to interact more with the local farmers and vendors.

A good first attempt at writing, but I really feel she could have offered so much more.