In New York, Ms. Heuman labored in a button manufacturing facility, as a nanny and as a waitress. She met Lu Burke, who would move directly to be a duplicate editor at The New Yorker, and so they lived in combination as a pair within the West Village. Ms. Burke progressed Ms. Heuman’s English via studying the dictionary along with her. (At The New Yorker, Ms. Burke used to be a infamous and feared language martinet, nicknamed Sarge via the manufacturing personnel.)
Ms. Heuman attended Town Faculty, and within the early Nineteen Fifties took a task as what used to be recognized on the time as a “woman Friday” at Doyle Dane Bernbach, then a fledgling promoting company. She labored there till her retirement at 60, ultimately overseeing budgets and paintings glide as a visitors director for the corporate. She married Charles Mendelson, an accountant, in 1952; they’d two youngsters and divorced in 1976.
“I felt I owed it to my folks to have youngsters,” Ms. Heuman stated in a 2019 communicate. However she additionally owed it to herself to depart the wedding when it went south and her youngsters had left the home. “Lifestyles is simply too quick,” she stated.
A couple of years in the past, Ms. Heuman made up our minds to return out officially to her son and her daughter-in-law, Lyndsey Layton, deputy editor of The New York Occasions local weather table; 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 used to be by no means a dialogue.” When she phoned Ms. Layton and introduced that she used to be homosexual, Ms. Layton recalled, she replied, “Sure, sure you might be, Margot!”
Ms. Heuman treated her survivor’s legacy a bit of the best way she treated her sexuality. It wasn’t hidden, however she didn’t claim herself. She waited till her youngsters requested her questions on it, and he or she responded them in what she discovered to be an age-appropriate means. When her daughter used to be very younger, she stated her Auschwitz tattoo used to be her telephone quantity, put there so she wouldn’t fail to remember.
“I don’t remember the fact that,” Ms. Mendelson stated in an interview, “however I all the time knew she used to be a battle survivor.”
