Our Daily Bread: A Meditation by Predrag Matvejević

The end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 saw one of the harshest winters of the century.

In norther Germany, near Osnabrück, my father [a Russian speaker from the Ukraine who had married a Bosnian Croat woman] found himself with a group consigned to do forced labor.They felled trees and trimmed the sleepers for new railway tracks . . .

On evening, a group of freezing, starving inmates in ragged clothes and wooden clogs was on its way back to the barracks. “We didn’t look human anymore. It was if we had turned into mere shadows of ourselves,” my father remembered.

They were intercepted on the narrow road by a stranger who invited them to his house. “Accompanied by our guard, we entered the house mistrustfully. It was Christmas Eve.

The man was a Protestant pastor. Following Abraham’s example, he gave his unknown guests what he had to offer. First, a chance to warm up, wash and save.

On the table was a slice of bread and glass of wine for each, followed by a simple meal, in keeping with Christian tradition on Christmas Eve. In gratitude, my father sat down at the piano and, his fingers stiff from work and frozen from the cold, played a fragment of an old Russian liturgy.

When the stay was over, the pastor and the inmates embraced each other. The guard did not report any of them.

His father, says the author Predrag Matvejević never again “equated his captors with the nation they came from.

In his late 70s, Predrag Matvejević Bosnian-Croatian author, philosopher and academic, re-told his father’s story in the afterword to his Kruh Naš (2009). This month an English translation– Our Daily Bread: A Meditation on the Cultural and Symbolic Significance of Bread Throughout History–becomes available. The translator is Christina Pribićević-Zorić and it is published by Istros Books who kindly sent me an advance copy.

Predrag Matvejević

Matvejević is an author new to me. I’m so pleased to have met him at least on the printed page, particularly as his work opens doors to the culture , largely unknown to me, of South East Europe and the Balkans.

Born in Yugoslavia in 1932, Matvejević studied French language and literature at the University of Zagreb, going on to teach there, at the Sorbonne in France and at the Sapienza University in Rome. He became a naturalized Italian citizen. His politics were Marxist, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize.

He is best known for his book Mediterranean Breviary (1987) translated into more than 20 languages. The cover for the 1999 English translation by Michael Heim says that “Predrag Matvejevic’s writing glints and eddies as if subject to the same winds and currents that stir his Mediterranean. . . he catalogs the sights, smells, sounds, and features common to the many peoples who share the Mediterranean—Jews, Arabs, Copts, Berbers, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Romans (and Italians), Spaniards (and Catalonians), the French, Dalmatians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Romanians, even Russians.”

Hungering for bread

The same free-flowing associations appear in Matvejević’s meditation on Our Daily Bread.  Six brief chapters quoting effortlessly from works in many languages and referring seamlessly to events in different histories move from bread’s ancient past, its appeal to each and every one of our senses, the complexity created from the simplicity of its ingredients, its use among many different peoples, particularly around the Mediterranean, its centrality to the faith of Christians and Muslims, and its place as the last resort of the hungry.  

You won’t find a single footnote.  That’s not to say that Matvejević had failed to do his research. His seventh and last chapter lists the multiple sources on which he relied.

Some are authors likely to be familiar to readers of this blog: Massimo Montanari who has written much and well on the history of food; Steven L. Kaplan whose knowledge of bread, particularly around the time of the French Revolution is unrivalled; Michel Foucault who urged Matvejević to look at the place of bread in thought of the Hellenistic Cynics; Georges Duby, historian of French daily life in the Middle Ages; and Piero Camporesi, author of Bread of Dreams (1989), suggesting that the poor of the Middle Ages were drugged with hunger or adulterated bread, the direct inspiration for Our Daily Bread.  Others are less well known, such as Arnaldo Luraschi, author of Il pane e la sua Storia (1953).

What links most of Matvejević’s sources, though, is that they hungered for bread, helped assuage the hunger for bread, saw bread as the food that could override political and religious differences as it had in the case of the pastor who fed his father and the other starving prisoners.

For me, it’s these sources that made the book, so it’s them that I will spend time on. That they are listed in the seventh chapter perhaps reflects Matvejević’s comment earlier in Our Daily Bread that seven is a number frequently associated with suffering and hunger.

Nikolai Vavilov, Russian botanist. He identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants, who worked to improved the cereals that made wheat, and who after falling foul of Stalin for refusing to go along with false predictions about cereal adaptability was sent to a Soviet work camp in Siberia. He perished in 1943.

Russian political theorist of anarchism, Peter Kropotkin. “The question of bread much take precedence over all others,” he said in The Conquest of Bread (1892), his last immensely influential work that inspired generations of resistance across Europe and beyond.

Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. His essay “The Wheat of Humanity,” was published in Berlin in 1922 in the Russian emigré newspaper On the Eve.  Mandelstam used the metaphor of grains of wheat being brought into an organic whole through the power of leaven to pleaded for pan- European integration rather than centralized Russian power.  He died hungry for bread in a Russian gulag in 1938, as Matvejević’s uncle was to do.

Russian author Varlam Shalamov. His short stories The Kolyma Tales recorded the many years he spent in an arctic labor camp. He described Mandelstam’s death and reflected on how tempted he himself was to steal the bread of a comrade while in the gulag.

Russian author Alexander Solznhenitsyn. He told Matvejević that for years after being released from the gulag before going to bed he placed a piece of bread under his pillow.

Armenian poet Daniel Varoujan. His The Song of Bread by (1884-1915), fifty pages of poetry poems that celebrated bread and the dignity of Armenian peasant life, was published posthumously in 1922. Varoujan was captured by Turkish forces and died on Mount Ararat by repeated stabbing.

Italian Jewish chemist and writer Primo Levi. If This is a Man (1948) details his year in Auschwitz where prisoners debated whether in order to survive they should steal bread from fellow prisoners.

German and American Jewish journalist H. E. Jacob. He began his Six Thousand Years of Bread (1944) before being sent to Buchenwald. He was released thanks to efforts by family, finished his book in the United States, concluding with memories of ‘bread’ made from potato flour, peas, and sawdust.

Romani writer, scholar and activist Raјko Đurić. He filled Matvejević in on translated sayings. He had lost part of his family in Nazi camps, more in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Italian author, psychologist and Sufi, Gabriele Mandel, whose father was a Sufi of Turkish descent and whose mother was an Italian Jewish author. Mandel introduced Matvejević to bread in Sufi literature. Mandel and his father has been imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis.

Egyptian writer and journalist Gamal El-Ghitani. He sent Matvejević the manuscript of Ihsan Sidhki el-Ahmed on the history of bread in Islamic civilization, which, when Matvejević had it translated, yielded a wealth of Arabic sources.

Meditation on Matvejević’s Meditation

I do not have much to say. It’s hard not to be moved by Matvejević’s plea to turn to the shared experience of bread as the basis of life in the worlds he moved in as a way to overcome divisions of ethnicity, religion and nationality. “Bread, ” he says, is “the condition of peace and the cause of war, the promise of hope and the reason for despair.”

It’s hard not to find it bracing at a time when fights over control over food writing and culture, some of serious import, others petty, are raging in American and British media.

It’s hard not to reflect that in his lifetime, in richer countries increasing affluence meant that bread went from being the basis of life to something that could be included or excluded from the diet at whim, accorded no special honor or significance.

And it’s hard not to ponder the fact that this is in the balance. As Norman Borlaug, whom Matvejević met and much admired, and with whose quotation he ended his book, warned: “hunger is still a common thing. Hunger is still all too frequent.”

Istros Press

Our Daily Bread is published, a small independent publishing house in London that adds five or six translations of literature from South East Europe and the Balkans to its list each year.  This seems an entirely admirable venture and one to be supported. 

Clicking the link on Our Daily Bread will allow you to order directly from them.

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