The Rye Bread Marriage

How do partners in long-lasting relationships live together without driving each other up a wall? After forty years of marriage, Michaele Weissman has a few answers. 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. "I am too young, and you are too Latvian," the twenty-year-old Michaele tells the twenty-eight-year-old John, explaining why she is ending their four-month romance. Fifteen years later, the two are married. Their love for each other does not assuage the trauma John experienced as a child during World War II; nor does it help Michaele understand her husband's unwavering devotion to every aspect of Latvian culture, particularly his passion for the dark, intense rye bread of his birthplace (nothing like the rye she knew growing up in her secular Jewish household). Michaele feels like an outsider in her own