A Description I Recognize

There's a play on Broadway on German Jews, the Catskills and the early 1960s.

The main female character is described thus:-

A statuesque woman who wears her sorrows like jewelry, Eva is witty, well bred and at times cozy in the manner of a doting Jewish aunt. But she is also, always, on the qui vive, ready to deflect any bid to break into the willfully isolated world she has created.

I think I have known persons like that.