The Rye Bread Marriage

March 1, 2023

Food/culture writer Weissman's nearly four-decade marriage to Latvian refugee John Melngailis, now a retired professor of electrical engineering, has withstood ethnic, religious, and personal differences and compelled Weissman to investigate Melngailis's homeland and war trauma. Then there's his culturally rooted passion for rye bread; he eventually opened a rye bread bakery. A story of what love really means, despite the complications; with a 40,000-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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June 5, 2023
Journalist Weissman (God in a Cup) reflects on the tricky art of staying married in her brisk and funny memoir. After meeting at a party in 1967, Weissman and her now-husband, John, a Latvian physicist, embarked on a summer romance. Weissman declined to settle down, however, and they didn’t reconnect until 1982, when they got married. Despite significant personality differences (he’s tied to his Latvian heritage, she’s firmly American), the couple shared a love of good food, so they “built a life centered around the table that accommodated our melded family and our oddball selves.” Their professional lives converged when they began making and selling rye bread together—a food at the intersection of Weissman’s Jewish heritage and her husband’s Eastern European upbringing. As a result, Weissman came to better understand her husband. The prevailing tone is light, but Weissman doesn’t shy away from serious topics, including John’s trauma as a WWII refugee, his eventual diagnosis with prostate cancer, and the impact of his bipolar disorder on their relationship. The result is a witty celebration of marriage that’s sure to resonate with anyone who’s taken the plunge. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

June 1, 2023
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 na�vely 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.

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July 14, 2023
Weissman's memoir is also an intimate portrait of her marriage, centered on rye bread. When the author, a Jewish American college student, first met John, a Latvian refugee and science PhD, not only did their religions and ethnicities clash, but so too did their health and everyday habits. John's bipolar disorder made Weissman learn--sometimes quickly, sometimes not--how to diagnose, help, and cope, along with him. In Weissman's loving retelling of their trials, successes, and strivings, she shares what she learned in revisiting WWII history and John's childhood in Eastern Europe/Germany. They traveled to Latvia and the ghettos John once inhabited, and a simple goal emerged: discovering the ""perfect rye bread,"" called rupjmaize. Family and friends factor in too, as much of the story covers John's search for his roots. And the ending is sweet: John's entrepreneurial pursuit, Black Rooster Food, introduces the wonders of Latvian rye bread to America and possibly the world.

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