Mimi Sheraton: Greenwich Village Housewife

Mimi Sheraton's boyfriend Irv made a tactical mistake when he decided to spend the summer after his senior year at NYU as a camp counselor. It was the summer the war ended. One of Sheraton's penpals, William Schlifman, had returned from the service. In the excitement of VJ Day, they decided to elope to Connecticut where the age of consent was 18. Sheraton broke the news to Irv at the Hotel Dixie. In her memoir, Eating My Words, she remembers a stifling night without air conditioning, the neon light from the street below and the cloying scent of Yankee Clover, her perfume at the time.

In April 1946 Mimi Sheraton had been married eight months. Her husband had changed his name from Schlifman to Sheraton. To Beatrice Solomon's dismay, her daughter Mimi and new son-law decided to settle in Greenwich Village. To his mother's horror, he had married a girl from Brooklyn. “We did not move to Riverside Drive to have our son marry a girl from Brooklyn", his mother said to her mother in their one and only conversation, reflecting the social pecking order of New York's Jewish neighborhoods.

Sheraton found a job as an advertising copy writer at an agency that handled retail stores. She made $40 a week, a good starting salary back then. She continued her studies at night. Her parents continued to pay her tuition. Her husband collected a GI stipend while attending Long Island University.

Sheraton reports that it was difficult to find an apartment in post-war New York. After a lot of searching, they took a one-room basement apartment for $65 a month. The battered, meager furnishings allowed the landlord to charge extra rent under the rent control laws. The apartment had DC current and it was hard for them to find appliances that worked. They were often awakened on weekend nights by drunken tourists knocking on their windows. Coal dust and even lumps come in through window when coal was delivered. Somehow a burglar managed to slip through the window bars and take a Rolleflex camera and radio. But thanks to the 1942 film “My Sister Eileen,” this was considered romantic, a substitute for for Paris for the newlyweds.

Sheraton, whose mother was an accomplished cook, began cooking herself, mostly on weekends. It was not an easy feat. The apartment's tiny kitchen was in a closet and had a small sink with a drainboard that overlapped one of the three burners on the stove. If you opened the oven door, Sheraton writes, you could not stand in the kitchen. She had to baste roasts from the living room. A tray-sized shelf on the inner door was the only work surface. She used the gate-leg dining table to chop and roll. Her one cookbook was the Jewish-American classic The Settlement Cookbook , a gift from her mother. Sheraton began reading Gourmet magazine, which sent her all over the Village looking for ingredients not found in the neighborhood groceries. The food department in the Wanamaker's department store on Broadway and Eighth proved to be a major source. The couple usually ran out of cash on Thursdays. She would return all the deposit bottles and buy eggs or a can of Broadcast Brand Corned Beef.