Pieces of Someday: One Woman's Search for Meaning in Lawyering, Family, Italy, Church, and a Tiny Jewish High School

 

Winner of the Reader Views Reviewers' Choice Award 

  

 

At the age of forty-four, Jan Vallone is everything her Italian American parents brought her up to be--a lawyer, wife and mother who owns a vintage home and takes European vacations. But instead of feeling happy and successful, she's consumed by frustration and anxiety that threaten to shatter her marriage and have dimmed her faith. Discarding prosperity and prestige, she takes a job teaching English at a yeshiva--an Orthodox Jewish high school--though she was raised Catholic. There, she opens her heart to her students, who bloom under her tutelage and teach her the meaning of faith and fulfillment.

 

Set in New York, Seattle and Italy, this memoir portrays how one woman fuses the facets of her life--family, career, ethnicity, spirituality and dreams--into a cohesive picture as luminous as stained glass.