La Giara (The Water Jug) by Patricia King Haddad

La Giara begins in Sicily in 1909, when adolescent Nunzio Minissale’s imperious cutting in line at the town water fountain leads to breaking his aunt’s giara —the water jug. This incident unleashes a lifetime curse that crosses the Atlantic from Sicily to the New World. La Giara becomes a symbol of the family’s rupture and its eventual reunion, challenging three generations of Minissale women. Nunzio thinks he wears the pantaloni in his family until he instigates an incident that prompts his wife and two daughters to disappear suddenly. Leaving behind their successful family bridal business in Philadelphia, they use aliases and take a cross-country train out West. In this inspiring story, long-shattered relations are eventually healed by Nunzio’s grandchildren, who discover that la giara, their symbolic container of traditions—some broken, some lost, some retained—has endured the cracks and damage caused by the patriarch of their troubled Sicilian family.