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 City College, and within the early Fifties took a job as what was identified on the time as a “girl Friday” at Doyle Dane Bernbach, then a fledgling promoting company. She labored there till her retirement at 60, ultimately overseeing budgets and work circulation as a site visitors director for the corporate. She married Charles Mendelson, an accountant, in 1952; that they had two youngsters and divorced in 1976.
“I felt I owed it to my parents to have children,” Ms. Heuman mentioned in a 2019 speak. But she additionally owed it to herself to go away the wedding when it went south and her youngsters had left the home. “Life is too short,” she mentioned.
Just a few years in the past, Ms. Heuman determined to return out formally to her son and her daughter-in-law, Lyndsey Layton, deputy editor of The New York Times local weather desk; they have been nonplused, having by no means considered her as closeted. Nor did her daughter, Jill Mendelson. “I always knew,” Ms. Mendelson mentioned. “It was never a discussion.” When she phoned Ms. Layton and introduced that she was homosexual, Ms. Layton recalled, she responded, “Yes, yes you are, 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 youngsters requested her questions on it, and he or she answered them in what she discovered to be an age-appropriate method. When her daughter was very younger, she mentioned her Auschwitz tattoo was her telephone quantity, put there so she wouldn’t neglect.
“I don’t remember that,” Ms. Mendelson mentioned in an interview, “but I always knew she was a war survivor.”