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Forbidden Bread:a Memoir
[Paperback - 2009]
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Sub-category: Memoirs
Additional Category: European History - Family & Parenting
Publisher: North Atlantic Books | ISBN: 9781556437403 | Pages: 304
Shipping Weight: .34 | Dimensions: 5.51 x .69 x 8.5 inches

"[A] sunny, can-do look at intense culture shock. Debeljak makes a humorous, self-effacing guide to her own story and the only complaint I have is that I wish she’d told us more. I hope someday she gives us a sequel."—Christian Science Monitor • "Witty and warm."—Kirkus Reviews


Forbidden Bread is an unusual love story that covers great territory, both geographically and emotionally. The author leaves behind a successful career as an American financial analyst to pursue Ales Debeljak, a womanizing Slovenian poet who catches her attention at a cocktail party. The story begins in New York City, but quickly migrates, along with the author, to Slovenia. As she struggles to forge an identity in her new home, Slovenia itself undergoes the transformation from a communist to a capitalist society. A complicated language, politically incorrect ethnic jokes, and old-fashioned sexism are just a few of the challenges Debeljak faces on her journey. Happily, she marries her poet and comes to love her new husband's family as well as the fast-disappearing rural traditions of this beautiful country. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Slovenian Ten Day War and the much longer Yugoslav wars of succession, Forbidden Bread shows a worldly and courageous woman coming to grips with her new life and family situation in a rapidly changing European landscape.

Erica Debeljak lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia with her husband Ales and her three children. Born in San Francisco in 1961, she moved to New York City where she attended college and graduate school before pursuing a career in international finance. In 1991, she fell in love with Ales Debeljak, quit her job to make a new life in a new country.

Unable to pursue her career in Slovenia where bureaucratic hurdles blocked the way, she learned the language, became a Slovenian/English translator, and eventually took up work as a writer and columnist. Her essays and stories have recently appeared in Glimmer Train (winner of 2007 Family Matters Contest), Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Nimrod, Epoch, Common Knowledge, Context, and Eurozine. Her work has been translated into over five languages.

She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and has published three books in Slovenia, including Foreigner in the House of Natives.

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