THE RYE BREAD MARRIAGE

A culinary history of a marriage.

In 1982, freelance journalist Weissman, “a fast-talking Jewish person from New York City,” married John Melngailis, a Latvian immigrant deeply connected to his country’s past and especially to the dense sourdough rye bread that, for him, represented Latvian history and culture. Weissman naïvely assumed that her husband’s obsession with all things Latvian would wane; instead, she found herself mired in a “decades-long battle,” which she reveals in this engaging memoir, an “exploration of bread and marriage, of history, identity, and all that the heart holds dear.” Early in their marriage, they decided that their children “would be Latvian-speaking Jews. John would ‘get’ ethnicity and language and I would ‘get’ religion and that was that. But, of course, that was not that. You cannot divvy up what is not divisible.” As the author learned about his family’s traumatic hardships, their flights from one country to another, she came to understand John’s attachment to relics, his apparent stoicism, and the confusing trajectory of their own European journeys. “From the cauldron that was his childhood,” she writes, “John’s restless need to move was reinforced, as was his insistence that he be in control of the mode of travel and his abiding nostalgia for where he has been, and where he is no more.” She understood that John and his brother “learned to suppress their emotions and their personal desires.” They protected themselves and their parents by not asking “for what their parents could not provide.” Weissman also reflects on her own family’s roots, her connection to Judaism, her vocation as a writer, and she explores themes of love, mortality, and morality. “I discovered what I believe,” she writes: “Other people are real. That is my morality.” The author came to love Latvian rye bread “slathered with peanut butter, or smashed avocado,” melted cheese, or smoked salmon. The bread, she admits, “civilized me.”

A charming, insightful meditation on the intersection of love, family, and food.