ST. LOUIS

AT A & M Bakery, the Grabic family bakes French baguettes that are popular with Vietnamese immigrants. They braid challah for Jewish customers.

Senad Grabic learned to bake rye in Germany after he fled his Bosnian home in 1992 as Serbian troops slaughtered thousands of his Muslim countrymen after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The round yeasty bread that fills the shelves at A & M is a taste of what he left behind. He calls it by its Bosnian name, lepinja.

But his daughter Mirela, 22, simply calls it white bread.

“We try to keep it neutral,” said Ms. Grabic, who like many refugees and children of refugees here, lives with the specter of the war but does not want to be defined by it. “We’re internationalists.”