The Rye Bread Marriage (book)

A rye-bread memoir, The Rye Bread Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2023) is a culinary history about rye bread, telling the story of a marriage that unites two very different people, both with roots in rye-bread-loving Eastern Europe. Black Rooster Rye bread is the subject of the book, and it is a lens enabling the author to tell her husband [John Melngailis]’s dramatic family story and her own Jewish American story.


Michaele Weissman is a freelance journalist and author who writes about food, families, and American culture. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and dozens of other online and paper publications. She is the co-author with Carol Hymowitz of A History of Women in America, a narrative history that has sold nearly 250,000 copies since its publication in 1980. More recently, she is the author of God in a Cup, a travelogue and exploration of the specialty coffee scene.