A beautifully told, often humorous, unusual and also universal love story. A memoir about learning to live with another human being and about how every relationship is a mystery—and a miracle.
 
When they first met, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, a secular Jew, is hungry for an independent life as a writer and historian. When they meet again some years later, Michaele is ready. Or so she thinks. And anyway, opposites attract, right? This might be a simple story of two people, characters both, who meet, fall in love, and get married. But of course, no marriage is simple. The life Michaele and John build together intermingles sweetness—their love of good food, entertaining, and family—and complications—their ethnic and religious differences, the trauma John endured during WWII and its aftermath, Michaele’s thwarted ambitions, and maybe even John’s preoccupation with rye bread! As he opens a successful rye bread bakery, Michaele embarks on a European journey to understand where John grew up, excavating poignant stories of war, privation and resilience. She begins to reevaluate her own assumptions and prejudices, for the first time appreciating how rye bread represents everything about John’s homeland that he loved and lost. Eventually Michaele comes to love rye bread, too.
 
With fierce honesty, Michaele Weissman crafts a beautiful memoir, one that resonates long after the last page: How do the stories we live and the stories we inherit play out in our marriages? How do couples in long-term relationships live together without wringing each other’s necks? The Rye Bread Marriage will appeal to foodies—the ones who love rye bread and the ones who hate rye bread—and it will appeal to everyone who is bemused by the messiness of living with another person, and by what to cook them for dinner.