An American in Slovenia: Erica Johnson Debeljak’s Forbidden Bread

In the September of 1991, only a few months after the Ten Days War, a New York City financial analyst met a handsome Slovenian poet at a party in Brooklyn. The two soon embarked upon an affair that would lead them both far further than either expected.

And so begins author Erica Johnson Debeljak’s fascinating journey across the borders of country and culture, a journey that takes her from New York City to the small and newly independent country of Slovenia, from finance to language lessons, from an urban American capitalism to the political and social complexities of a fast changing Eastern Europe. Forbidden Bread is the story of a life altered for love, a memoir that spans the spaces between family and politics, tradition and modernity, the intimacy of an individual life lived within the broad strokes of history.

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Excerpt from Forbidden Bread:

Twenty-Fourth Street

After the first night at Marion’s, Aleš and I dispensed with the inessential: with dinner, the taxi cab, the neon street. In short, with any trace of the outside world.

We retained only the essential: the bed, the darkness, and the two of us. The division of the world into essential and inessential comes naturally enough in a love affair, and in this case it had the added benefit of shielding us from the more irksome elements of our situation: elements like nationality, cultural background, permanent place of residence, and that eternally ticking clock, the countdown, three months to go. I kept the kitchen stocked with fuel to keep us going—cheese, bread, olives, wine— and Aleš took care of our more ephemeral needs. He arrived each evening armed with books and Xerox copies of things that he wanted to show me—an article, for example, called “Voices From Yugoslavia,” an anthology titled Child of Europe: A New Anthology of East European Poetry in which his poetry appeared in English translation, a slender tour guidebook with a picture of Ljubljana’s Three Bridges on the cover—and a dollar rose purchased from the twenty-four-hour Korean grocery on the corner below my apartment.

We slept little those nights. When we weren’t doing the essential thing, we talked and talked and talked some more. He told me about the city of his birth, Ljubljana. It was, he said, the only city he knew of whose name derived from the word love: ljubiti. He told me about the country of his childhood: not Slovenia, but Yugoslavia, a country he had belonged to without ever much thinking about it, just as most children do. American children start their day with the Pledge of Allegiance, while Aleš and his Yugoslav schoolmates started theirs with one of their number standing up in front of the class, raising a clenched fist and shouting “za domovino!”—For the homeland!—and the rest of the children shouted in response “s Titom naprej!”—Onward with Tito!

That, of course, was only the most obviously jingoistic element of his childhood, though also recalled with affection and nostalgia, but there were countless other galvanizing moments: his trips crisscrossing the country—Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Novi Sad—with the Yugoslav judo team; the communist youth projects that had been launched in the postwar years to rebuild roads and bridges and villages destroyed during the war, but by the sixties and seventies had transformed into a sort of socialist Burning Man festival imbuing the young not only with the rousing collective power of the international working class and brotherly love toward their fellow Slavs, but with ample opportunity to get drunk and have lots of sex. During those years, Yugo rock was huge. In the West we had the Who, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac, all of it. But Yugoslav kids were actually better off. They not only had the world but their own private little kingdom that no one else understood. They had the Who, the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music, Fleetwood Mac, and the Sarajevan band Bijelo Dugme, the Serbian Bajaga, Azra with its charismatic lead-singer Johnny S? tuli´c. We graf?tied the words ENO IS GOD on the sides of San Francisco’s stucco buildings; in Ljubljana it was S?TULI´C IS GOD. Yugoslavia was the air Aleš breathed growing up, the milk he drank, a more pungent and intoxicating sort of milk than what was on offer either in the capitals of the West or in provincial and pastoral Slovenia. He never thought of himself as any¬thing but Yugoslav, ethnically Slovenian too, of course, but Yugoslav more than anything else.

Aleš read me translations of his poetry, and I read him love letters that James Joyce had written to his wife, Nora, when he traveled home to Dublin and she remained behind in Trieste, their shared city of exile. I was reading her biography that fall and was enthralled by it. Aleš told me that, in fact, Trieste was only an hour’s drive from Ljubljana and that, yeah, it was known for James Joyce, but in the universe of his childhood it was where, when they didn’t drive over the Alps to chilly Klagenfurt, they went to buy blue jeans and Illy coffee and washing detergent, and to catch a glimpse of the glistening Miramare Castle and its for¬mal gardens at the far end of Barcola Beach. Trieste was a beautiful sore in their side. It should have been theirs after World War II. Trieste was their lost maritime capital, their shopping mall, the backyard fence through which they caught a glimpse not only of the sea but of Western beauty and abundance.

He told me an apocryphal story about James Joyce and Ljubljana and Trieste, a story that says a lot more about Ljubljana than it does about the now legendary Irish writer. On Joyce’s ?rst trip to Trieste, he rode the Southern Railroad line through what was then still Austro-Hungary. The Southern Railroad ran from the empire’s most important city, the capital, Vienna, to the empire’s most important Adriatic seaport, Trieste. Tired from the long journey and unfamiliar with his surroundings, Joyce disembarked from the train too early. He stumbled down the steps and into the dim light of Ljubljana’s train station. When he realized his mistake, he wandered out of the station and found a park bench across the street. He had no money, so he curled up on the bench and slept until morning when he boarded the next southbound train to Trieste. Today Joyce plaques are sprinkled throughout the city of Trieste—the Berlitz school where he taught English, the countless pubs where he drank, the countless apartments where he lived until being evicted for failing to pay the rent.

And all that Ljubljana has is a park bench.

But that, Aleš told me with a sad smile, is no tri?ing matter to Slovenians. That park bench is the subject of periodic anthologies and anguished poetic musings.
“I have an old friend,” Aleš said, “a great poet named Tomaz? who grew up on the Slovenian seacoast. His grandmother used to ride with him and his brother and sister on the old Vienna-Trieste railway line. After they got on the train in Vienna and crossed the Austrian border into what was then Yugoslavia, she would stroke their silky heads and croon to them. ‘Go to sleep, children. Go to sleep from Vienna to Trieste. There’s nothing in between.’” Aleš sighed.

“That’s where I’m from,” he said, “from that nothing-in-between.”

By that time, of course, I was already besotted with my black-haired poet-lover. I could hardly imagine how my workaday life in Manhattan had had any meaning before I’d met him. I pushed aside the duvet cover and moved across to Aleš. I slid up on to his lap and wrapped my bare legs around his waist.

“It’s all right,” I said, kissing the scar above his eye, the shadow that lay across his cheek. “I think I’m starting to love that nothing-in-between.”

I meant, of course, that I was starting to love him, though I didn’t dare say so. Which in retrospect was a good thing because he broke up with me the very next day.

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Thanks goes out to our editorial intern Miranda Schmidt for this post.

Click here to learn more about Forbidden Bread.

Click here to read full book review at Shelf Awareness.
Click here to visit author’s web site.