The Rye Bread Marriage

How I Found Happiness with a Partner I'll Never Understand

By: Michaele Weissman

Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik

Experience a beautiful, humorous, universal love story with this memoir about learning to live with another human being and how every relationship is a mystery—and a miracle.

When they first meet, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, 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 opposites attract, right?

The life Michaele and John build together intermingles sweetness—their love of good food, entertaining, and family—with complications, including their ethnic and religious differences (Michaele is Jewish; John is not), the trauma John endured as a child during WWII, Michaele’s thwarted ambitions, and even John’s preoccupation with Latvian rye. When he opens a successful company marketing rye bread, Michaele embarks on a European journey in search of her husband’s origins, excavating poignant stories of war, privation, and resilience. She realizes at last that rye bread represents everything about John’s homeland that he loved and lost. Eventually Michaele comes to love rye bread, too.

An enticing memoir for listeners of Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass, Bess Kalb’s Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, and Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland, The Rye Bread Marriage asks, how do the stories we live and the stories we inherit play out in our relationships? After forty years of marriage, Michaele Weissman has a few answers.

©2023 Michaele Weissman (P)2023 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

“In her captivating memoir, Michaele Weissman affirms that we are all more connected than we think. With a little bit of humor and a lot of grace, Weissman makes the case that marriage is an emotional continuum, and love is just one end of it. This book is all at once honest, relatable and endearing.”
—Pati Jinich, New York Times bestselling cookbook author and host + executive producer of PBS’s La Frontera and Pati's Mexican Table

“Weissman's striking reverence, her bold humility, and her compassion for her brilliant and traumatized Latvian husband as she unearths his compulsion for his home country’s bread make this tale of food and love and life and war soar. I closed the last pages with tears in my eyes for the gift of these complex histories, this compelling love story—and a determination to find the best rye bread in town.”
—Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of Book of the Little Axe

"A charming, insightful meditation on the intersection of love, family, and food."—Kirkus Reviews