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In New York, Ms. Heuman labored in a button manufacturing facility, as a nanny and as a waitress. She met Lu Burke, who would go on to be a replica editor at The New Yorker, and so they lived collectively as a pair within the West Village. Ms. Burke improved Ms. Heuman’s English by studying the dictionary along with her. (At The New Yorker, Ms. Burke was a infamous and feared language martinet, nicknamed Sarge by the manufacturing employees.)
Ms. Heuman attended Metropolis Faculty, and within the early Nineteen Fifties took a job as what was identified on the time as a “lady Friday” at Doyle Dane Bernbach, then a fledgling promoting company. She labored there till her retirement at 60, finally overseeing budgets and work circulation as a site visitors director for the corporate. She married Charles Mendelson, an accountant, in 1952; they’d two kids and divorced in 1976.
“I felt I owed it to my mother and father to have kids,” Ms. Heuman stated in a 2019 speak. However she additionally owed it to herself to go away the wedding when it went south and her kids had left the home. “Life is just too quick,” she stated.
A couple of years in the past, Ms. Heuman determined to come back out formally to her son and her daughter-in-law, Lyndsey Layton, deputy editor of The New York Occasions local weather desk; they have been nonplused, having by no means considered her as closeted. Nor did her daughter, Jill Mendelson. “I all the time knew,” Ms. Mendelson stated. “It was by no means a dialogue.” When she phoned Ms. Layton and introduced that she was homosexual, Ms. Layton recalled, she responded, “Sure, sure you’re, Margot!”
Ms. Heuman dealt with her survivor’s legacy a bit the way in which she dealt with her sexuality. It wasn’t hidden, however she didn’t declare herself. She waited till her kids requested her questions on it, and she or he answered them in what she discovered to be an age-appropriate manner. When her daughter was very younger, she stated her Auschwitz tattoo was her cellphone quantity, put there so she wouldn’t overlook.
“I don’t keep in mind that,” Ms. Mendelson stated in an interview, “however I all the time knew she was a warfare survivor.”
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