Miss Bitterness

This morning, as I took Caju out for our early walk, something at the entrance to my home in the kibbutz caught my eye. Among the stones along the path, a small plant insisted on growing. It wasn’t a promising sprout or a flower worthy of a second glance—it was just a simple, stubborn thing with wrinkled leaves that seemed tired even before they had fully emerged. I bent down for a closer look and saw something profoundly defiant in it, as if saying, “If I’m here, it’s because I’ve fought harder than you.”

I thought about it throughout the walk. Some people live like that—quietly obstinate, unnoticed, and misunderstood. They carry the weight of the world without complaint, taking a deep breath and moving forward even as everything around them seems to crumble. They are not heroes, mind you, but those who grow old without celebrations, work without an audience and die without a monument.

When I was a child, a woman lived on my street in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil where the summers are sticky, the winters sharp, and the streets are framed by jacarandá trees that drop purple carpets in the spring. She always wore slightly faded dresses and spoke so softly that it sounded like she was murmuring. We called her “Miss Bitterness,” though now I wonder if “Miss Resilience” would have been more accurate. I don’t remember her name. People said she had come from a shtetl in Germany that was emptied before the Holocaust began. Those who stayed behind disappeared, but she had escaped alone and arrived in Brazil carrying little more than her life.

She never spoke of her past. She worked as a seamstress to make ends meet and lived in a small house on Castro Alves Street, near the corner of Fernandes Vieira. She was discreet, invisible, as though she wanted to occupy the smallest possible space in the world. One day, unexpectedly, she offered me a slice of carrot cake with chocolate frosting, a staple at birthday parties in the 1970s. It was simple, but at that moment, it felt like a piece of a life she’d stitched together with whatever she could salvage.

As I ate, she remarked, “The secret to a good cake is the oven. Take it out too early, and it sinks; leave it in too long and hardens. Life is the same, Yingele.”

At the time, I thought it was nonsense. But now, with the weight of years, I realize she was trying to teach me something she couldn’t quite articulate: the importance of finding the right balance in life, of not hardening or collapsing too soon. Miss Bitterness, who had crossed an ocean and rebuilt herself in quiet dignity, knew what she was talking about.

When I returned from the walk with Caju, I glanced again at the plant. It was still there, still growing. Perhaps life doesn’t ask us to grow in silence—it asks us to grow so that someone, one day, will notice.