Forbidden Bread

Johnson met Ales, her “black-haired poet lover,” in Brooklyn in September 1991. Three weeks later, he called; they went to dinner and to bed. By Thanksgiving, he had “dumped” her, but they got back together and by 1993, he proposed and they married. The plot complication in this boy-meets-girl story is that she is an American investment analyst, and he's Slovenian, “the leading poet of his generation.” The title comes from a Slovene saying, roughly translated as “you always eat the bread that you've forbidden yourself.” Johnson will “leave everything—family, friends, country, job, language, income, independence”—and head for a world where “a bucolic and feudal society is colliding, on a rather delayed schedule, with the late twentieth century.” Her memoir functions as a love letter to her husband and an introduction to the Slovenian world, its language, social customs and tangled history (Slovenia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, officially became a nation-state in 1991). While sometimes self-absorbed, the author offers an intriguing story about the birth of a new state as well as the “series of coincidences, mishaps, and thunderbolts” that led from Brooklyn to Ljubljana. (Apr.)