Book Report: The Rye Bread Marriage

Of Language And War

My summer reading list is quite different in its requirements from my post-Christmas one. Summertime reading is more “meaty”.  I want to be informed or sucked into a fictional world, whereas after Christmas, I just want my worn-out brain to be amused and probably soothed. Of course, I have a lot on my reading plate as I am trying to learn Italian  and my son-in-law appropriately has given me  Stefano Jossa’s La Più Bella Del Mondo – Perché Amare La Lingua Italiana (The Most Beautiful In The World – Why Love The Italian Language). I am struggling mightily with reading this treatise on the history and beauty of Italian. Even in beautiful Italian. 

But there is so much more than the musicality of a language that was birthed in the Reunification of 1861. At the entrance to the  Biblioteca Salaborsa on Piazza Maggiore is the most soul-searing memorial to the young Bolognese partigiani who were executed during World War II by the Nazi regime – numerous black and white photo tiles of their faces and names with some photo tiles depicting scenes of their execution. It is one of the reasons I became so engrossed in the struggle of Italian citizens over a twenty-year period of fascism, which ended in not only a civil war but one that became  complicated when Italy switched sides in World War II from the Axis to the Allied Forces to defeat Hitler in Europe .  

Which brings us to the next installment of my summer reading session. Caroline Morehead wrote a four-part series of the Resistance in Europe during World War II, titled “The Resistance Quartet”. It includes  A Bold And Dangerous Family, Village of Secrets, A Train in Winter and the one most poignant to me in Bologna, A House In The Mountains, which details the lives and service of four women in the Italian resistance. I am finishing this book this summer and am going to read the others as they unlock little known but unbelievably heroic work done by “ordinary” people to stop the tide of fascism in Europe. 

The author is a terrific historian and prolific biographer, and the research she did to bring these  four women into the light makes for a gripping read.  After the war, women partisans were excluded from the victory parades, and Caroline Morehead follows their marginalized lives in the aftermath of World War II . Reading through this book takes some time and focus, as she crams in  a lot of information that dilutes her narrative. Still, to have an understanding of the violence, cruelty, extreme hardship and starvation that Italian citizens  endured before, during and after World War II should be appreciated by any reader in a country that has not been invaded and has not suffered a Civil War in well over a century.

Of Bread And Marriage

The second book that I am reading in English is Michaele Weissman’s memoir The Rye Bread Marriage. It too has a resonance in the desperation, the mental and physical displacement suffered by European citizens during World War II, which  the author explores with an intimate candor and humor. A few years before his retirement, her spouse, John Melngailis, founded a bread company to recreate the Latvian rupjmaize of his homeland. You can read about his company, Black Rooster Food in this previous KD post. Black Rooster, by the way, is the translation of John’s Latvian last name Melngailis. 

This book ventures far beyond more accustomed writing styles. Imagine instead a series of  video clips in writing, if you will, pieced together into a compelling story. It’s as if you as the reader were sitting down with Michaele (preferably with a glass of wine and some Latvian bread snacks) and having a chat about childhood and marriage.  There is an immediacy in The Rye Bread Marriage that would be missing if it were written as a straightforward memoir of a marriage between an American Jewish woman who has a sassy sense of herself plus career ambitions and a Latvian professor whose childhood was forged in refugee camps. His parents fled Latvia, not because of the well documented horrors of Nazi Germany, but rather as a result of the largely under-publicized nightmares  of Stalinist Russia. While the Nazi regime were notoriously excellent record-keepers, the murder and torture of millions of Russians and citizens of countries Stalin invaded  were generally unrecorded. 

Like many Americans, I  have not experienced the lack of food to the point of near starvation or brutal authoritarian rule, nor have I lost my homeland to an oppressive invader.  The Rye Bread Marriage is a tale of journeys – a writer who struggled to find her way, a stateless academic who by recreating the lost bread recipe of his childhood finds a purpose in his adopted homeland. Their romance, separation, marriage, parenthood, careers, and the struggle between two vastly different family histories come together with a tough and resilient bread that in the end they share not only with us but also with their ancestors. Let others have their pulpy summer paperbacks; struggling through Italian and tales of fascism and famine is my well timed summer reading in 2024.

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