Forbidden Bread by Erica Johnson Debeljak (North Atlantic Books, $15.95 trade paper, 9781556437403/1556437404, April 7, 2009)

In 1991, in New York, Erica Johnson met Aleš Debeljak, a sexy, melancholy Slovenian poet, in fact, the leading poet of his generation. They fell in love but not smoothly. He broke up with her several times, telling her it wouldn't work. They certainly had different outlooks on life: he preferred the resignation of melancholy while she preferred shuddering misery, which is what life with Aleš seemed to promise, according to her friends. Even he said, "You're not going to survive," but he also said, "I cannot not love you." So she left her world of city financial analysis and followed him to Ljubljana, "the wild heart of the land of ex-girlfriends."

This was an amazing time to be in Slovenia, two years after its liberation from crumbling Yugoslavia. "In late June 1991, Slovenia woke up after the surprising victory of the Ten Day War, rubbed its eyes, and looked around. The day before, it had been the perennially dull and diligent A student in a variously backward and brilliant, barren and abundant federal union made up of Montenegrin shepherds, Muslim dervishes, Zagreb coffeehouse intellectuals, Belgrade cosmopolitans. But the day after the war, Slovenia woke up alone . . . the poor and dangerous neighbor of a jittery European Union. The cordon sanitaire between civilization and chaos."

They married, and the day after her wedding she woke up to the ear-splitting sound of weeping, lamenting women--a disorienting reminder that she was in a very other country and now a "member of a black-haired wild-eyed clan of southern Catholic Slavs, the kind of family that finds it very hard to let go of their only son."

And so she started her Slovenian education, in a capital city that still had small farms alongside the streets. She had language difficulties, of course, with some wicked turns: Slovenian has a special form for two, useful for writing love poems, but maddening to master. And as attracted as she was to "the dual transforming into the plural, I rebel, along with the rest of the class, when confronted with one final grammatical/numerical twist in the Slovenian language--namely, that the plural form is used for only three and four, and when you get to five and above you revert to the singular. With the introduction of this rule, the whole project seemed to take on perverse, almost sadistic, dimensions."

Erica Johnson Debeljak has written a witty and lyrical memoir, filled with deep love for her adopted country and Slovenian family. Whether she's explaining what "forbidden bread" means or why tending graves is a passionate national pastime or rebelling against na široko (a form of triple diapering), she writes with exuberance and depth. She and her poet have three children now, and after their first child, Klara, was born, they realized that "we have substantially more items on the agenda that call for negotiation and compromise. Offsetting that, of course, our field of potential discovery and wonder is that much wider." And we are the richer for her discoveries.--Marilyn Dahl

Shelf Talker: An exuberant and tender memoir about falling in love first with a Slovenian poet, then with his country.