We should never take our daily bread for granted

In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing it. His father, he explains, a Russian-born Yugoslav soldier, had been a prisoner of war of the Germans, part of a group consigned to do forced labour felling trees during the bitterly cold winter of 1942-43. One evening, freezing, starving and looking barely human, the group was stopped on the road back to camp by a stranger, a Protestant pastor who invited them into his house and, risking reprisals, nonetheless gave them a chance to warm up and eat some bread with a glass of wine.

After the war, living in a small town where captured German soldiers were often paraded in the street and treated vengefully, the former prisoner of war remembered how he had once been shown human warmth at a critical moment and instructed his young son to take some bread to the prisoners. This involved ceremoniously cutting in half the one loaf of bread that his entire family received as a weekly ration, hiding it under his shirt, then surreptitiously giving it to a German prisoner, whose eyes welled up with tears.

Predrag Matvejevic, a Bosnian Croat philosopher and academic, says he never forgot his father’s story, and for years wanted to write about the history and significance of bread. Although he often started, just as frequently he abandoned the project, emigrated from his country and wrote different books. Finally, in his late seventies, he produced this meditation on why bread is much more than merely food, yet its publication now (for the first time in English) is posthumous.

Our Daily Bread contains some profound ideas about life. It is both a celebration of and a lament for bread, as the author meanders through connections to history, art and literature.