▷S2E9 Michaele Weissman on the Meaning of Bread

In her literary memoir The Rye Bread Marriage, author and food writer Michaele Weissman turns her skills with history, psychology and adventure to her own family story. This interview begins with the travel story that led to Michaele's seminal book on specialty coffee. It goes on to describe the Latvian poetry and the loaves of bread that opened up Michaele's understanding in ways that surprised her as a writer and as a human being in love with a theoretical physicist war refugee.

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Born in Latvia at the dawn of World War II, Michaele's husband John grew up in a tiny village that felt lost in time. He arrived there on a harrowing journey where his mother smuggled the family across Europe on a currency of rye bread crackers and pharmaceutical Everclear. John's devotion to Latvian rye bread and poetry as recounted by Michaele is an extraordinary example of how recipes and proverbs serve as vehicles of cultural memory. 

The Rye Bread Marriage is an unvarnished relationship tale, an impressive piece of scholarship on language and foodways, and a riveting and reflective example of 20th century war literature. I hope you are moved to purchase the book after listening to this interview. I also recommend the audiobook! Here is Michaele's website:
https://michaeleweissmanwrites.com/

If you are listening to this interview just as it's coming out, there is still time to sign up for Michaele's memoir writing class that starts January 14 (online via DC's Politics and Prose bookstore). If you missed it, don't worry, she works regularly as a teacher and coach, and you can stay in touch with her on instagram.

Yes, this is the same rye bread that I was eating with rye grain advocate Avery Robinson in S2E7. You can buy it in select specialty groceries and also order it online in the US by visiting https://blackroosterfood.com/

• Expand for auto-generated transcript. (Please excuse errors.)

  I find coffee just as coffee is exploding and I say, "I've been home with children and being good and blah, blah, blah for 20 years and working from home, writing from home." Yeah, and I want an adventure. Like I have a stepdaughter who'd visited 62 countries on her job. So I want an adventure like Ilza. So when this coffee thing came, It's interesting at moments in your life because I said to John People were talking to me you won't understand this until you go to one of these cup of excellence Competitions and you see how we're judging coffee and you meet the cast of characters. So I said, okay, I'm gonna do it Welcome to Modo di Bere, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. If you're a new listener, welcome. If you're already a fan of the show, you know that this is a show about local culture through drinks and dialect. Some of the folks I interview talk more about drinks, some more about language. I'm quite sure today's guest has a lot to say about both. Michaele Weissman is an author and writing teacher based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She has published four books and hundreds of articles in August of 23, Algonquin Press published her literary memoir, The Rye Bread Marriage, in which she tells her husband's family story and explores his obsession with Latvian rye bread while pondering the nature of long -term marriage. Her previous book, God in a Cup, is widely credited with putting the specialty coffee industry on the map. She is the co -author with Deborah Prothrall stiff of deadly consequences and examination of teenage gun violence, a history of women in America which Michaele co -authored with Carol Hemowitz has sold a quarter of a million copies and is still in print four decades after publication. Michael has been married for 40 years to John Mangalis, an emeritus professor of electrical engineering, who owns Black Rooster Food, a small company that markets authentic Latvian rye bread. If you heard season two episode seven of this podcast, my interview with rye grain advocate Avery Robinson, that is the bread I was tasting during the episode and raving about. Michaele, welcome to the show. Thank you, Rose. It's a pleasure to be here. Before we dive into the interview, I want to mention that you can support Modo di Bere on Patreon and unlock exclusive bonus content. Find out more at patreon.com /mododibere. There's also another way that you can support the show for free by leaving a five star rating for Modo di Bere on Apple Podcasts and writing a review. This really helps people discover the show and I love to hear your thoughts about the podcast. Michaele, I already know we have so much to talk about from writing to Latvian poetry, to traveling, to research the history and culture of food and drinks. I have so much to ask you about the rye bread marriage, but let's start with your book that's about drinks. I love the title. Why did you call your book "God in a Cup?" - Well, I called it "God in a Cup" because I was at a coffee competition in Panama where the coffee guys and the I was extremely excited by a recently discovered coffee, Calcivar, and I literally heard one of the judges say, although I am not religious when I first tasted this coffee, I saw the face of God in a cup. And so there you have a title for a book that then everybody thinks is about religion, but what can you do about that? But that coffee, which is called Gaysha, just took the coffee world, the specialty coffee world by storm and it took a trend that was building and that people all over the world were getting excited about and it just sent it over the top. And the price of a pound of Gaysha coffee wholesale, you know, went up to 100 pounds and 200 pounds in times and it's still Kind of going strong. What's interesting about that coffee is it's not my favorite coffee And it is not the favorite coffee of a lot of coffee people because it's so tea -like and delicate That it's almost It doesn't it doesn't have quite the robustness or hint of robustness that most of us like in our coffee but But it certainly was the right coffee at the right moment. And it really, that coffee changed the world, I would say. - Tell us about traveling around and doing this kind of agricultural reporting that you did for the coffee book. - Right, as a New Yorker girl who knew nothing about whose parents grew tomatoes in the suburbs, but that was about it. Well, you know, the real story is, so when I started writing about coffee, the writing business was changing. I was a freelance journalist. I had written for all kinds of places, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and The Washington Post and blah, blah, blah. About how long ago was this? Okay. So this is about, I started writing about coffee in 2006. And As I started writing about coffee, our son was off living his life. I was a free woman. And what really happened is that I had to specialize. I was encouraged to specialize because that was the nature of the business as it was changing. And so I picked food because I had been a home cook and obsessed all my life. So it was kind of a natural. And I started writing stories about food for the Washington Post, which had a new food editor and she was looking for writers. So there was a, you know, we came together there. And my best friend said, "You know, in my office," she was working at the Wall Street Journal, "people are sneaking up to the executive office to get better coffee." And I went, "Aha, like a story. So I wrote a piece called "The Upscaling of Office Coffee" and it is a cliche, but I fell down the rabbit hole because I started interviewing the young, they were then about the age that you are now. They were in their thirties and they were sort of young dudes who'd come out of the barista world and they were changing the nature of the coffee business. And also because of modern communications, you didn't have to have a big fat, juicy, rich company buying coffee. You could like take your backpack and get on an airplane and go talk to a farmer or a farmer's cooperative and buy coffee. Okay. So I land, I find coffee just as coffee is exploding. And I say, I've been home with children and being good and blah, blah, blah for 20 years and working from home, writing from home. Yeah. And I want an adventure. Like I have a stepdaughter who'd visited 62 countries on her job. So I want to adventure like Ylza. So when this coffee thing came, it's interesting at moments in your life, because I said to John, people were talking to me, you won't understand this until you go to one of these cup of excellence competitions, and you see how we're judging coffee and you meet the cast of characters. So I said, okay, I'm going to do it. And I wrote to the New York, I talked to my editor at the New York Times, she said, we're not paying you to go there. But if the story is good, we'll take it. - Yeah. - And I went, okay, all right, I'm gonna do that. And so, and so I get on a, I get on a plane, I get, you know, you get an airplane ticket. And it's, this was a really adventurous kind of travel 'cause I'm going to, you know, the high up mountains where coffee is born and is grown and where these competitions are. But it's also kind of safe for an old broad because I'm with all these young people who know the, you know, I don't have to invent this world myself, but I can participate in it. And I can have the fun of literally, you know, bouncing around in jeeps in the in the coffee highlands in Guatemala, and in Panama, with people with young guys who We'll really talk about coffee from 10 in the morning until they fall into their beds drunkenly at night. (laughing) At midnight or four in the morning. I mean, they are, it is everything to them. And I love the coffee, but it's the people that I was, I mean, it was the scene that just, that just kind of completely blew me away. And I recognized it. You know, for journalists, you have, you know, when you land in the middle of a story and you have access, this is the greatest thing in the world. And what was funny about it is that I was at the time, probably old enough to be all of their mothers. Or almost or almost. It sounds like a blast. It sounds like you all had such a blast we had a blast and it didn't matter the generational piece didn't matter because I was interested Yeah, of course and it was I mean and I was loving the adventure I'm just was loving the adventure. So I went to Latin America with them and then and then I Went to Africa because there was a there was a huge because people were in love with Ethiopian coffee And there was a big competition in Ethiopia, and I went, and that was really life changing and career changing, and, but you know, it was, I don't think I've told this story on air before, but what actually happened is the trip to Latin America had been totally fabulous. I think I made two trips to Latin America, one before Africa and one after, but that was all fabulous. I'm going to Africa and Peter Giuliano, who is now with the Specialty Coffee Association of America, and I want you to meet him because he's a brilliant, brilliant food guy. I was supposed to meet him in London and take a plane to Africa with him, and I've always been incredibly fond of him. The day I was leaving for Africa, my big chance, you know, here I am, my big literary chance, I was eating, I was anxious and I was packing and I was eating grapes off the counter and I think they weren't washed and I get on the plane to go have the big adventure of my life and I am so sick and I get on the plane and the the flight attendant looks at me I said oh my god I think I have you know dysentery she said this bathroom This is yours, you can stay here all night. They were so kind to me, but I had E. Coli. - Oh my God. - And I got it in the States. I did not get it in Africa, but I took it with me and it was so, so this great adventure of my life. Well, it was a great adventure, but it was about the hardest three weeks of my entire life. I wound up in the hospital in Rwanda. - Oh my God. - But you See, in Rwanda, they know a lot about diarrheal diseases. But by that time, by the time I got in London, they totally mistreated my illness. They said, oh, you know, it's nothing. I said, no, I'm bleeding. No, it's nothing. Well, it wasn't nothing. But they understood in Rwanda. But by the time I got to Rwanda, I had been sick with this for, I don't know, five or six days. And my gut was completely ruined. I was destroyed for months. But, you know, here I am. I'm in Africa and I have a story and I am gosh darn it, God damn it. You know, I'm going to follow that story. And I did and I got the story and I got the book. I mean, there were no second chances the publisher was waiting for a book. And there's a funny thing about this hunger for adventure because sometime later after the book came out, Peter said to me, "You know, Michael, you're famous among the coffee guys." And not just because you wrote the book. He said, "You're famous because you're the woman who went to Africa, got horribly sick, body coli, which can happen, you know, got this horrible intestinal disease and toughed it out and so you know me I never really thought of myself as toughing it out but I guess I did and so you know I'm famous in coffee land so. Oh I love this story I love this story not because you know I'm so sorry that you ended up getting sick but to hear about this, this setback and just your, your sense of just going for it and seeing something that was going to be cool. And you're like, you know what, I'm going to do this. I'm just going to get on the plane. Yeah. And you can't, you know, that's the thing in life. I mean, you get to these points and am I going to weenie? Well, there was no chance I was going to weenie out. But yeah, I was in Ethiopia in the hotel. And I'm going, Oh, this conference is nice but this isn't what I came to Africa for and I'm still sick as a dog but I hear that people are driving up into the highlands to go to the coffee to go meet coffee farmers and I said can I come with you nice I just you know I got I I got on yet another jeep that that what you realize in coffee world the roads are so bad the road but and And it, I mean, it was an amazing, and it was an amazing adventure. I gotta tell you, as a fellow foodie and fan of drinks who did not expect to become sort of an agricultural journalist. I have had some wonderful experiences with winemakers bouncing around on jeeps, on the hillsides, and those are just some of my most glorious, most adventurous fun times. I'm like, okay, now we're gonna get in the jeep and visit the vineyard. Oh gosh, I just think it's so much fun. I read and studied about these things for years and drank wine before I really got the chance to go and visit these vineyards. I just gobble up every moment of it. I want to look at every plant and see everything with my own eyes. There's just nothing like it. No, there's nothing like it. And after you've had these kind of adventures traveling for work, it's kind of hard to travel, travel. I mean, the old -fashioned way where you're going, like, from one site to another. Because when you have the privilege of, you know, people open doors and they invite you into their, this, you know, there's highly specialized worlds. And these are really gifted, passionate people. You know, you absolutely can't beat it. But I must say, in terms of the trucks, and then there is the moment, at least in, in Ethiopia, and in Panama and Guatemala, there's that there is the moment when you realize that the truck is coming down the mountain and it's trying to go by these huge craters that that are I mean these aren't potholes they're craters they look like they were left by you know stars that landed at that hundred million years ago and there's nothing to do but close your eyes you just close your eyes and go okay some people die but most don't. I guess we'll be okay. Yes. Yes. I can relate to that too. Yeah. Yeah. If the podcast listeners remember, I want to check it out. I believe it's season one, episode 12 is all about my experiences driving in Italy to visit to visit Vineyards and, you know, the amazing kind of hillside situations. It's really exciting to talk to you about God in a Cup. I have uploaded the book on Kindle and really excited to read it. Before we talk about the rye bread marriage, I just want to ask you, how did your experience of writing God in a cup and having those agricultural experiences change the way that you drink coffee? - Oh, I mean, you know. - Like what were you drinking before? - Oh, I was drinking this stuff, this local Washington stuff, which I thought was good. It's called, you know what? I want that mouth them, it's a local roasted and that's what I was drinking. And I would tell coffee guys how great it was. And they would say nothing. The way I say nothing when people tell me how great their coffee is. And, you know, it wasn't coffee that interested me. It was, I mean, it was hot water with Ritalin actually in those is, it was the people's story. - Yes. - And I don't mean this in an old -fashioned way, but the unknown -ness of the locale that I was so curious about. And also that these young guys actually thought that they were going to be able to rewrite the rules of capitalism. And they were going to be able to ensure that the coffee growers got adequate money, that it didn't all go to middlemen. Now, have they been successful at that? You guess. I mean, no. In fact, I followed up the book with a long story in Sprudge. It's a publication for coffee professionals. And of course, capitalism is a very complicated and enrooted system, and it is very hard to change it. And certainly for the buyer to You know, you really can't it's not possible to represent two interests. Hmm fully passionately at the same time So anyway, but that that that so but I so the first coffee story I did which was this office story I I am somebody told me I'll go to murky coffee and Capitol Hill and talk to Nick Cho because he's a really good coffee guy And I literally, I went there and Nick Cho made me a cappuccino with really high quality espresso. And it was like I saw God in a cup. I mean, not quite as elevated as that, but it changed me forever. Yeah. And I am, I'm still, I'm a journalist and I have a pretty good palette. I bet you my pallets probably not as good as yours. These things can be learned. These things can be learned. Well, and but I and but well, yes, they can be learned. But B, my job is to get the story. Yeah, I don't have to do what the people I write about do. I have to be able to understand what they do. I have to do it a little. But I think one And when I got the story, better than people who are crazy about coffee is that I could see the story as well. I could see the coffee and then I could see the story and that's a different thing. But I drink really, really good coffee and I insist on it and I travel. You know, we are people, John and I are people. I travel with my own little Hario, pour over. The Hario is the best because it has, the paper is fluted. So there's the flutes, there's the flutes going in one direction, but the Hario has lines around the edge that are horizontal. So you have hard, and that delays the, as when you pour over the water, it doesn't, It doesn't pour through so quickly because it's delayed in two directions. You can see how mathematical I am not but So I travel with a Harrio and I travel with my own coffee, which I must say I grind it at home I that I do but I will not drink bad coffee. I mean, I really want yeah, they really change that really change things It's really it probably changes things for me and ditto. We travel with our own rye bread Yes, I always I'm always in the suitcase and it used to be that John did it and I rolled my eyes and then the more I got into this story, the more I was like, "I don't travel without this." So let's talk about rye bread. Can you tell us about your first time trying Latvian rye sourdough bread as you related in the rye bread marriage? Okay, So I had met John when I was a 20 -year -old college student, and he was a new PhD working at MIT Lincoln Labs. And we had this summer romance, and he was very Latvian. He was born in Latvia. He was a refugee. He was foreign, foreign, foreign, foreign. And we had this-- and he's very cute. He was very cute. and we had this hot summer romance and then I was 20 years old. Married, are you kidding? I'm going to New York, man. This is not marriage, it's not in my plans whatsoever. So anyway, we broke up and I went to New York and wrote a book and did all the things I wanted to do. And, you know, the way you do in New York and you know everybody, you know what's going on. You live in New York, you know what's going on. I do. Yes, so that's the, and I loved it, and then I woke up one morning around the age of 35, and I said, "Oh, I want to have a baby." I'd never really thought, anyway, so, and just then John called, and he was getting a divorce, and he had married and had two daughters, and he was still in Boston, and da -da -da -da -da -da. So the second time we dated, I'm serious 'cause the baby hunger is nipping. I mean, this is a mixed metaphor, but the baby hunger is nipping at my feet. That's not where it nips, but whatever. I mean, the minute we got back together, it was just clear to both of us that we were gonna get married. We had liked each other, there was chemistry. And I was visiting Boston shortly after He started dating the second time and he took me to his mother's house to meet his mother and to taste her bread. And we were also going, we were going later on to a dance with these Latvian people who I didn't think were very hip at the time, but John was hip. But all his friends were older, a little bit older than he and they were, they were Anyway, that's a different story. They were very folksy. It was a folksy scene. And they were very, so they definitely, they, you know, the, because of the, this is during the reign of the former Soviet Union, and they were desperate to reestablish their home country. And they were, the way some exiles are, they were more Latvian than Latvians in Latvia because Latvians in Latvia are super, are Europeans. Okay. Anyway, but that's, so I meet my mother -in -law. She's this little creature with stockings rolled at her knees, literally, and eyes that are so intelligent that, you know, I could have run out of the room screaming with fear because this lady wasn't going to miss much, but she had made the bread and she made homemade borscht with meat. So we sit down for dinner. They serve me a piece of this bread and it, she doesn't have a baker's oven. She lives in a small, subsidized apartment for old people in Newton, Massachusetts. So you can imagine the quality of the oven. Probably, if it went up to 325, it was a lot. And not so good for bread baking. Yeah. Not so good for bread baking. And it was the bread was gray instead of this beautiful black crust that we love so much or I love so much now and it was and it was made in a form because it wasn't hot enough to you know cohere as a beautiful Eastern European loaf that has the marks of the baker and anyway and I take a bite and I I'm profoundly underwhelmed and I start but I look at these two and I look at this guy and I look at his mother and I, you know, a lot was required of me at the moment and as you might have noticed that I am up to the task of talking and so I just went into a like operatic aria about how fabulous his bread was and oh my god and it went so well with the soup and it was sweet and it was sour and it reminded me of the Forest floor and mushrooms. Oh my god, but it was I was I was You're lying. I was Understand the bread and I did I more, you know, it's like you Food is a vocabulary just, you know food is a vocabulary and You have to not just open yourself to the taste of food. But if you're really going to get it, you have to understand the vocabulary in which it's spoken. And that took me many years. At this point in the show, I'd like to make a shout out to Steve Silverstein, the audio engineer who assists me on this podcast. I do my own recording and editing, but I hire Steve to remove background noise, reduce sibilance, and adjust reverb to maintain consistent sound quality when I record in new environments. Even with my experience with audio, I have a background as a singer -songwriter. When I decided to start a podcast, I had a lot to learn on the technical side. Steve's informative, patient, and encouraging consultations have taught me so much. I knew audio quality was going to be a priority for me and I feel so lucky to work with Steve. If you have a podcast or are thinking about starting one, and you're looking for some help. I hope you keep Steve Silverstein in mind. And if you're a musician or have other recording needs, he's also a wonderful recording, mixing and mastering engineer for some of my favorite artists. You can reach or recommend Steve from his Instagram, steveco .worldwide, and give him a follow to see his posts for Weird Gear Wednesdays. Again, that's on Instagram, steveco .worldwide. After the Soviet Union collapsed, John started ordering rye bread from Latvia, and this was a whole different thing. I mean, this bread is a work of art the way a baguette is. I mean, it's a magnificent thing, and it's a folk... It actually is the apotheosis of Latvian peasant culture. And there's a thousand years of love and skill in the making of it. The number one baker in Latvia, Lachi Bread, the owner of that company got his parents had been rich farmers who lost their land. The Russians seized their land and turned it into a collective farm. When they got back their farm following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the owner of Lachi Bakery turned his family's farm into a kind of like museum, a Disney world of rye bread, where they make the bread and they had children coming to see how you make it. And newlyweds would come and make their first loaf of bread together and they had stores and restaurants and this and that. And they had a beehive oven where the bread was baked at 950 degrees. Wow. What does that taste like? What does it look like, this piece of language that is a loaf of authentic Latvian rye bread? So the loaf itself in Latvia, the loaf's John sell, first of all, the loaf on the outside is this shiny brown black. And from the same, And the brown black is caused by the same thing that caused coffee roasting. It's called the mayard Reactions that it's a browning reaction and it makes things sweeter as long as you don't burn it So so you have the the rye the mayard I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right, but you know you got a mayard. So you're you're you're having this shiny Black brown tough crust and then you cut it you don't cut you don't slice it with a serrated knife you slice it with a big heavy chef's knife because it's so dense and then you get this beautiful chocolate brown interior and the there's no in the best rye breads there's there's no molasses there's no browning there's no false browning this browning is all in the baking and it and it's beautiful and it has lovely little, it doesn't have the big puffy holes, irregularly sized holes of a baguette. The holes are more, you know, the, as the fermentation, as it bakes and there's this popping inside. - A tighter crumb, as they say. - It's funny, you just, that's exactly it. It's a tighter crumb. And the bread itself is, So Latvian rye bread is really different. In the Baltic, rye grows better in that part of the world than they all eat rye bread. All the other rye breads are flat a bit in their taste. Most of them are fermented, so they have some sourness to a degree. Latvian rye bread, which is loved throughout Eastern Europe, is sweet and sour and it has some sugar and the sugar drives the fermentation so that it is more sour more fermented than but but it also contrasts with the what you get in the last me and Robert is first of all you get this perfect tooth some texture because I always say it fights back when you bite down into it doesn't it's not fighting back, like eating a piece of like tough meat, it's toothsome, your teeth sink into it. And so that's the first thing. And then you get this array of flavors that run, you know, sweet, sour, caraway, and the rye itself, which is a very earthy, it's a, it's a very kind of earthy flavor that's enhanced by the sweet, the sour, and the caraway, and that's all that's in it. There's no wheat whatsoever in a real loaf of Latvian rye bread. It is a magnificent accompaniment to all manner of foods, but maybe the best of all is sweet butter. - If people are now completely salivating, there's two things you can do about that. You can hear even more about this particular That that your husband John is creating with black rooster food in that episode Two season seven interview with every Robinson where I'm tasting the bread this exact bread that we're talking about and Really enjoying it and then also they if you're in the United States, they ship So you can go to black rooster food comm and just get some and and try this bread and order Michael's book, The Rye Bread Marriage, and put some sweet butter on your, on your rye bread, slice of rye bread, and, you know, in one hand and this lovely book in the other. But that's how much love and depth of knowledge goes into a loaf of real Lafayette and rye bread. And it took me, I always like to think I'm so smart, but I'm often so stupid because it took me a long time to get it. When we started going to Lafayette, I started to get it. And then once I started working on this book, it opened up. My understanding got deeper and deeper. That's where the poetry comes in. - Oh, I definitely want to talk about the poetry. One of the things I find most exciting about the book is the Latvian folk poetry, this folk song poem called the Dinah, Dinahs. I'm wondering if you could actually just read to us from that section of the book about the Dinahs. Would you mind? I want to set this up a little bit. So I have married this guy and he is Latvian and our marriage is constructed in order to allow both of us to have our different identities. But my understanding is superficial at best. And my sympathy is also superficial. And John talks about these dinas. And I, you know, I'm a writer and I think it's interesting. And I get it that the, it's always fascinating to me that even translated that the language is so elusive. But I don't really understand. And John loves these dynas. He loves them. And when he was at MIT, he actually worked on a project to get them transcribed onto digitally. And he got some money from some foundation. And he found a scholar who was interested in this. I mean, this is in his guts. And I don't, I don't really understand the bread. and I don't really understand the dinas, and I know that it's important to him and he loves to sing, but as I was working on this book, and I'm struggling to understand the bread, and I get, if I find books and articles about the dinas, and I find a few places where they're actually well, I think the translations are elusive and beautiful, it slowly opens up to me that this is the culture, that this is where these people come from and that the reason why the Latvians, no matter whether they're Lutherans or not, they're all, they have a connection to their pagan past, which is not cutesy. It's about a relationship to nature that is beautiful and deep and definitely, definitely not a cliche and that doesn't open it to me in one day. It slowly opens, but as that opens then I am able to write a book about rye bread and my husband that is equal to the subject. And that's absolutely the absolute and no one Rose has understood. I think most people read the book and they want to read the parts about the marriage and when we were having fights and all that and sort of those are great. Those are great. But yeah, but you understood this because of your being so embedded in language and poetry and stories and it's very touching to me that you're not Latvian but you have you get the universal and it's it's so it's very beautiful to me so I can read the dinas that John loved so much and quoted so often Our four line poems often sung, often referred to as folk songs that describe the life cycle of Latvian peasants. The seasons passing, young people marrying, old people dying, some dinas are hundreds of years old, some are thought to be much, much older, although scholars find it difficult to assign dates since no one automatically wrote down the lyrics until the end of the 19th century. That's when a generation of young rebels began thinking about dinas as, and this is a scholarly term, vehicles of memory, expressing their hunger for political independence, autonomy. One scholar explained the historical importance of the dinas, writing that "folklore served to create a national consciousness and pride." This sentiment helped fuel the Latvian independence movement. The hero of this movement, Christianes Barons, in the hope of instilling pride in the hearts of his countrymen, helped launch a campaign to collect, study, and eventually publish folk song lyrics. Barones appeared to women in rural areas, asking for their help in particular, because it is they who led the singing of folk songs during seasonal celebrations, and it was they who most cherished these short verses, in which so much meaning was unfolded. Some of these women told Barones that they had learned to properly read and write in order to help him compile a catalogue of the dinas. Thousands of correspondents, men as well as women, sent him over a quarter of a million of these short poems. Today there are over a million on file at the National Library in Riga. Barones believed the folk songs expressed the spiritual beliefs of the Latvian people. They are he wrote the vessels of their soul Let me go on that is beautiful. That is beautiful I would love for you to just read a couple of the dinos themselves Two folk songs describing rye cultivation and rye bread were among John's favorites The first which describes Diaz the ancient Baltic gods riding through a field of rye seems like one of the very old ones. Some experts believe that dinas are related to the Hindu dinas. The Hindu Vedas, a literary tradition that originated 8 ,000 years ago. The Diev's Dina describes in symbolic terms the time when rye, a fast replicating grass that evolved in the Middle East spread across Eastern Europe. This event occurred thousands of years before the first beta was composed. The song makes more sense when you know that rye turns a warm, earthy, gray color when it is ready to be harvested. Dieves was striding through the rye field. He was wearing a gray coat. When he reached the edge, he spread over it gray years of rye. It's so sophisticated. This poetry is so sophisticated. That's, it's, the meaning is enfolded in what isn't said as well as what is said. It's so moving to me. And then the second Rai Dainai John loved was very different from the first. This verse was homey, earnest, highly domesticated and prayerful in a way that recalls Christianity, whether it was Christian or not. Though Lutheranism has been the established religion in Latvia for 500 years, many Latvians, Christian and non, cling to pagan ideas and a mystical understanding of the natural world. And this poem is, "God grant that I should die, as did father, as did mother, father threshing in the barn, mother kneading dough for bread. >> Wow. I really think the centrality of this bread to this culture is just -- I mean, you wrote a whole book about it, but there's also that poem. >> Oh, that's exactly right. And it's so touching to me. I mean, it took me so long to understand that and that I was able to convey it it to, of course, you are a particularly knowledgeable and open -hearted reader, but still, I was able to convey that. It's very meaningful. It's very meaningful to me. One thing that really struck me as I was reading your story, the book is in three parts. The first part talks a lot about the story of your marriage. The second is the stories of your husband's childhood as a Latvian war refugee and the third shares more of your rye bread research and also talks about your own family history through the lens of rye bread. Going back to the first part of the book, you do hilariously present both of you as such kind of stubborn characters. One thing that I find really touching is that you sort of kind of refuse to learn Latvian, right? And I think that it might have really helped you to maybe be more accepted by these people in the folksong group or whatever. But in the end, you actually use your gift of language to go to Latvia and learn all about the dinos. You know, so in So in the end, rather than learning the language itself, you hear the story, you find the story. And the piece that's not in the book, which is so incredibly moving to me and kind of brings things full circle, is so when I married John, a lot of the his, they're actually not his pairs, they're his friends, but they're slightly older because he was so little when he was in when they they ran away from Latvia um he was only five he was only five but um they were opposed to our marriage and they were not particularly nice to me and I am a very stubborn person and I certainly and I was 35 years old and I was a writer and I had written a book and I knew who I was and I wasn't Latvian. I was me. And John loved me as me. And I wasn't going to become anything else. And I wasn't even particularly, I was less interested than I might have. Well, I don't do well with coercion. That's really the thing. That if the door had been open and I had been allowed to tiptoe in, I might have tiptoe in a lot sooner. You wanted to be accepted on your own terms. Yeah, well, I insist upon it. I mean, in fact. And I was 35 years old. I was not a child. But the piece that's not in the book, because it's what followed the book, is that so many Latvian people, especially ones who are of every age, but particularly ones who are the age of my stepdaughters. So a little bit, you know, like in their fifties say, they are so thrilled by the book. And so many Latvian people have told me, "A, we've been seen and we're so grateful to be seen." And also that I have captured the generational story because John, the impact of having a refugee in your family, well, it has an impact on the wife who was born in America, but it has a big impact on the American -born children. And so my own, you know, my own kids, my own step -daughters said to me, you know, now I understand Haiti, and I understand because and and so there's been a coming full circle and you know my gift I mean it's it's interesting I in terms of the dinos I'm not sure I regret I mean linguistics isn't my gift but something else is this capacity to go deep and to think about something for a long time until it opens itself up. I think that's my gift and that's what I was able to do. And so that would have been better. I mean, would that have, if I'd learned Latvian, if I'd really learned Latvian, of course, it would have been better. But if I sort of learned Latvian the way I learned Hebrew from my bat mitzvah, it wouldn't have made any difference because you, you have to, you have to enter a language, yes, you know, to understand the poetry. And I think I understood it the way I understand things, which is I found the ideas that underlay it. And I thought about them a lot. And then it opened up to me. You would have learned Latvian. Well, I mean, I say that in a having in a good way. You know, though, I love what you're saying, though, even as you're saying linguistics isn't your gift. If let's say your gift is actually stories, history, getting this big picture, and the details. And psychology. Yes. So, I mean, I'm not sure you don't understand linguistics, you know? Like I think you're getting to the heart of it and you're finding these stories. And I'm loving, I loved reading your book and I loved, I'm actually listening to it on an audio book which was lovely, seeing how you work in the parts that are probably a little more similar to the coffee book where you're traveling around talking to bakers and stuff. And you and John are traveling together and you talk but having a recorder hanging off your neck, and you and he really together in your own ways, work you've done together, work you've done separately. It's, you're like folklorists. - The linguistics part, I think you're right in the sense that rather than understanding, rather than moving into syntax, it's always my way to understand the big picture. So, I understand the context, the linguistics context for that language and that culture. And that's true. That is the way my mind works. About being folklore, I mean, John and I were that funny team. I became a folklorist because using the traditional techniques of journalism that I use for the coffee book didn't work. It didn't produce the coffee book at its best, and I was sort of, that gave me 10 months or 8 months to write it, and the end is a little rushed, but the best parts of that book, you know, I really, it's the, it's narrative nonfiction. It's you put yourself in the story, and then you, and if the story is interesting and the people are interesting, you report what happens, and if you're a good reporter, you get something juicy, and especially if you have a sense - un companion.. PC, aby? Sac. (.。 Пр -. Simply whatsoever -. Credit via. ( Assembly. - We. hook The. 吗! cooked. ¿. firing. Mat. � Ethereum. ahh. 현. 2? - Ly if. If ie. ( fellows? één (? 例えば. Hay, 呢 .... 에 ear. second elt. (. sal. מ bowls. Is Mickey. OK.. cop. seven. Co. He. wrapping 5? hand. Flex. It. Fi KK. Qu ends. Two mainly. Fore. ��. しい. 합. read stra. ( Pre 220. Mash. C 힘�. Please - -- ®. Find. contracted vic. Bur. чего و. plu. B Wall persons. struck inspirational licence Labour. 220 interviews än I could I literally followed around the three people people thought, you know People in the industry thought were the most creative and wacko and interesting and I got a story But you can't do that with the history of bread. It's way too broad and way too embedded and not in the first bread products Have been now found in 30 ,000 years ago in several different archaeological digs in Europe. We're talking about the history of the entire world. You can't get that journalistically. First of all, I had to realize it wasn't writing about bread. I was writing about rye bread. Then I had to admit to myself, "I am not a baker and I'm not even interested in becoming a baker. I'm interested in, I'm always interested in meaning. So that's what I went after. And I just kept working it and working it. And then, and the dinos really were, and the dinos and the scholarship around the dinos were, they opened doors to me to go more deeply. You linked this scholarly research about the history of this culture, along with this cinematic heartbreaking story about the war refugees that I want to ask you a little bit about, but then also with this marriage story. And you put all of them in there and you wove them together, I think, very successfully. And there's just this, there's a lot of bang for the buck in here. I think it's very literary, but it's also very scholarly. But it's also very funny and very kind of intimate. Yeah, it's an amazing book. I can't wait to see what you do next. Oh, my God. Well, thank you. I, it's so touching, you know, that writers, you write to be read, and you know that everybody, when they read their book, they read their projection of your and you know that you get it in such a complex way well as maybe follow you anywhere Rose I mean yes really really really well maybe we should go on an adventure together I think I would say that this book coming out has been extremely uh rich experience for me in all all kinds of ways. And especially with how Latvian, Latvians and Latvian Americans, and they understand the different levels of the marriage. They understand the price people pay for being refugees and how that plays out in our marriage and in our family. - Tell us a little bit about that story in part two of what your husband experienced when he was five years souls. So John was born, I always say, you know, a minute before World War Two started, he was born in February, he's older than I am, and he was born in February of 1939. And in a few months later, the Germans invaded Poland and, you know, and all bets were off. And so he, first the Russians invaded Latvia, at the very beginning of the war, and then they retreated because the Germans, who originally, they were allies, the Germans attacked, and the Russians retreated, and then the Russians came back. The Russians came back in 1944, and John's parents, the educated class, and They were newly educated in Latvia because it was a new country. The educated class, basically, they all fled because they knew that when the Russians left in 1941, they had sent 20 ,000 people to their death in Siberia and they didn't all die. And so they knew what was coming for them. So John's family, they were accompanied by, you know, hundreds, about 100 ,000 people fled. But John's family fled and they fled, and this is the first thing I knew about John when I met him when I was 20. They fled west to Hitler's Germany, and I'm going, I mean, I was, I stood at history. I mean, I understood why they went west. But part of me, You went towards him. Who are you? And I knew that, I mean, they were never, they weren't complicit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's like, you went West? So anyway, that sort of, and so I actually explained how that happened. And they went West to escape the Russians. And they went West as the Germans were also fleeing because they two works running away from the Russians. And they went first to the Sudetenland. But John's mother was a pharmacist. And when the war broke out, she had stockpiled medical supplies. And I always get the name of this kind of alcohol wrong. But anyway, it's basically a hundred -proof alcohol that has medicinal purposes. but if you cut it with water, 50 /50, it makes vodka. And which is more precious than gold during wartime. And so she had stockpiled all this stuff. And when they fled, they took a train to the Sudetenland. There was their first, and they took their big suitcase, with their crates, and they had all this stuff. And they basically bribed their way, were able to bribe their way across Europe. They went to the Sudetenland, and then the Sudetenland also fell to the Russians, was falling, and they had to flee again. And they made it, they took a train across Germany. They, I think, John says, I think that my mother -in -law is vodka was a big help, but they got themselves a bunch of Latvian families, Got themselves on a cattle car get this a cattle car You know that we know what these cattle cars had gone east with human cargo But so there's empty cat have cattle cars The cattle car is attached to a coal train that the Germans are moving across Germany because they don't want the allies to catch it and to get their hands on it and they go across Germany on a train as Germany is burning literally burning and but somehow they make it they may and they head Towards a southwest corner of excuse me of Germany where there's no It where there's where there's no military nothing nothing of value to bomb. It's a rural area and they are like They constants and Leo the Swiss border and the French border. And when Germany falls, it becomes the French zone. And so they spent, John's family spent five years in the French zone. So here's this little kid born in Latvia whose nanny spoke German. He already speaks Latvian and German. And then he grows up from the age of five to the age of 10 in the French zone, speaking French at school, and but living in a village, I am not exaggerating, there are 12 houses in this village, and it looks like it came right out of the Grims Ferry Tail. I have never seen a place so remote. Adjacent to that tiny village is a larger village where in fact, there were many Latvian families, but John's family is living really in the, not just in the 19th century, maybe in the 18th century. There was electricity. There's no bathrooms. There, I mean, it, it was so, um, it was so primitive. For the first 25 years of our marriage, I didn't understand that John's experience as a refugee is actually very different from the other Latvian refugees who were in the English zone or the American zone, or God forbid, if you were in the Russian zone, you know, when the war ended, they sent you back and they killed you. So, but he had a most unique childhood. And that's so my Theoretical physicist husband who is Lafayette and who loves rye bread is also partially -- he is like a creature from another century. You know, I mean, and John never had a toy that they didn't build themselves. It's sort of unimaginable. And what's fascinating is how unimaginable it is to his children. And that's why my writing the book, I think for the family, it opened up. Oh, that's why he's so strange. He's not straight. I mean, he's a very devoted, loving person. But you know, he's also strange as, as are we all, but there, there are so many people with an immigration story or a refugee story who can relate to this tale with, or the descendants of someone with a story like this, with the effects on the family, with these things that are hard to understand, with these stories that take uncovering, and also I think sort of the absurdity and the close calls. It's really a riveting account in part two of the book, I really hope someone makes a movie out of it. It's a really fascinating story. And as you get into part three of the story and you start to write about your own family history with your own Jewish family eating the same rye bread, you know, your four bears in, you know, Belarus area, I started to wonder, I hope you don't mind me asking you this. Was it almost easier for you to to face John's past than to reckon with your own family history during the war? Like, perhaps researching and telling John's story was an indirect way to get you closer to this, this really heavy history that you, You know, both understood, but also you talk so much about seeming to feel kind of guilty for growing up in a privileged way. This, this sort of survivor story was researching John's war tale, kind of a way for you to, to indirectly look sideways at, at your own family story. I think that's brilliant. And, and what's so amazing is I did not notice that you write up your, you start to write a project. I had no idea. And I had been brought up. This, what this book taught me is that my parents, my, so my parents were both first generation Americans, but my father was a college educated first generation American who became a naval officer in the US Navy, which is extremely unusual for Jewish Americans. They, the Navy, the Navy. And my mother worked in a Boeing plant during the war and she had a little child who went to the Boeing nursery school. My parents were so profoundly, that war experience was their generational experience and it was so important and it confirmed their profound Americanism and that America had defeated Hitler And for my parents, in some ways, they turned their back on the fact that they had a lot of cousins who died in the Holocaust. They never dealt with that. Because everybody deals with the drama of their own that comes close to them. And for them, it was World War II and making it into the managerial class and educating daughters and making them ladies and you know okay so I really didn't get it I must say and I'm not very religious although I'm very culturally Jewish and I really didn't understand and I didn't expect to understand but one of the unusual long -term things that as I dealt with this material, I also had to deal with my own, but it wasn't intuitive. It came slowly. And my friend Sarah, who's not Jewish and who's English and who I teach with, she got it. There's a scene in the book. She got it before I got it. We're sitting in the, we both swim and we're sitting in the hot tub after swimming. And is questioning me. And I'm going, no, no, no, no, no, that's not my story. Right. So what I learned is that multiple generational, the conveyance of trauma exists on both sides of our families. I will say that I do think that many Jewish Americans have a lot of, It's interesting have a lot of, you know, there's a, there's a, you know, I hang out with these shrinks. There's a shrink term called counterphobic, which is that, and counterphobic is you look at what you're the scariest, you're most frightened, and you, and you say, I'm not scared of that. I'm going to, I'm not scared of heights. I'm going to go bungee core jumping. And you kind of leap over your fear by what you do, but you never deal with inside. And I think for my family, that was certainly true. And, and it was writing this book unveiled that to me. And I, there are other Jewish people who, you know, who had relatives who fled in the 30s. And I mean, very, very, there are very many different American Jewish stories around the Holocaust, but that was ours. And so, yes, the book, as books will, the book led me to a confrontation with John's past and with my own that I was really surprised. But I think that any writing worth doing is going to surprise the writer. That's, in fact. I really appreciated how you let that kind of hang out in the last part of the book. There's some scenes where you finally go back to where family members of yours were lost and you kind of freak out. And yeah, you know, after we've read this incredibly cinematic, tightly researched point of account. And then we go back into the voice of the first part of this book with this bracing honesty. And I was, I was really kind of moved because even in the narrative, you position it as you're behaving badly, because you kind of freak out when you're in Lithuania doing trying to do the same kind of work that you did for John and expecting it to be the same for you. But how could it be, you know, it's these stories trying to bridge through these silences that you had experienced in your own generational story. I don't know, I actually, I think I would have been on your side in this moments when you were behaving badly. You were having some emotions and I think those were good emotions. I think there's, you know, maybe there's more, maybe there's more stories there. Maybe there's more to tell. - Well, that's why I want to do another. You know, I'm not so young. You know, I want to live long enough to write the next one, which deals with this stuff more and deals with, but it also keeps moving back to food because gender was the issue of my generation and is the issue of my generation. And women are struggle to birth ourselves as full people. And what it meant to me to write in my 20s, kind of entirely by accident, my best friend and I wound up writing this, this book called The History of Women in America, which is still in print. And because Carol was working for a publisher who wanted a, literally wanted a pamphlet about women's history, because that's what it would be worth. And, you know, seven years later, Bantam published this as a, as a, as an original paperback, but learning about those brave women in the past is why I've had the life I live. I mean, I love my parents, I adored my mother, I adored my grandmother. And I learned, I mean, I learned many things from them, but I did not learn how to live as an independent person on this earth from them, I learned that from women's history. And so I want to come back and visit some of that. But I also want to visit my grandfather, my maternal grandfather, after whom I'm named, was an anarchist with a gun. But then he died a very tragic death. But it had nothing to do with anarchism, his anarchism. And he was young. And so there's also this whole, in my family, There's lots of multi -generational impact of trauma and the death of my grandfather. But so I wanna kind of cozy down with that stuff. I'm gonna start a sub -stack here by 2024. I'm starting, as soon as I figure out what that means because I'm old, I'm doing it. I'm going to start a substack and I'm going to start writing pieces because that's writing pieces is the way you start a memoir. Well, you just sign me up for that. I'll be your, I'll be your substack reader. Yeah. I was really touched when you talk about visiting your Jewish grandmother in New York City and, you know, generally appreciating the grocery stores here. That's something that I can really relate to. There's a really sweet story at Zabars, which is a famous grocery store in New York City where you have this hilarious, really sweet story about sharing this rye bread with people coming and tasting it, that is a lovely story. But I just really encourage everybody to get this book. It's The Rye Bread Marriage Wherever You Buy Books by Michael Wiseman. Can you tell us about your website? Right. So I'm on Instagram and I'm on Facebook. And if you go on my Instagram, there's this little link tree thing. And you can hook up to all the stuff I've written. And you can also find a way to buy the book. And also, I have a website that has tons and tons and tons of material. It has all these articles I've written about food over the years. It has the saybars chapter. It does on your website. Yeah, exactly. www MichaelWeismanWrights .com. And so it's M -I -C -H -A -E -L -E -W -E -I -S -S -M -A -N -W -R -I -T -E -S .com. Michael WeismanWrights. It's really fun talking to somebody who has been doing for so long the kind of work that I've just started doing in the last in the last couple of years for for wine and just telling stories. Your book meant a lot to me and thank you so much for coming on to the show. It was a complete and utter joy Rose. I mean it's the the meaning of the nothing in life is more joyous than the meaning of the minds. You know you make you meet a new person and you listen to one another and then you find that you're really hearing one another. And it's a gift and it's a talk about adventures. It's a wonderful adventure. So thank you. To all of our listeners, thank you so much for being here. Wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. Follow Motodiberi on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for even the unique and encouraging drinks and language content. If you would love for the show to continue in growth, support Motodiberi on Patreon and unlock bonus episodes. Find out more at motodiberi .com, where you can also sign up for my newsletter. Music for the podcast was composed by Urcilia Prosperi and performed by the band Oh. You can purchase their recordings at ohumusic .bandcamp .com. (singing in foreign language) El brazo paías o que permanecen dejándose llevar Un otro se engañando se dejanse para ese mismo  

Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com

Produced, recorded and edited by Rose Thomas Bannister

Audio assistance by Steve Silverstein

Video version by Giulia Àlvarez-Katz