Like many younger Jews, Mimi Rosenbush and Beverly Siegel have abandoned assimilation and taken up the traditions of their mothers and fathers. Out of their experience the two Chicagoans have produced an impassioned one-hour documentary called Return Trips that reflects their belief that devotion to Judaism can be a transcendent force for good.
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Along the way, says Siegel, Schwartz turned nonobservant, though his leadership in the Workmen’s Circle kept him focused on the moral tenets of Judaism. “My chief memory of him was hearing him speak at some Workmen’s Circle meeting,” she recalls. “I must have been five years old. He was talking in Yiddish, and I had no idea what he was saying. But he moved people.”
Rosenbush’s maternal grandmother, Miriam Levy, died while still in her 40s, the year Rosenbush was born. “I never knew her,” she says. “I only know what my father told me about her. Her parents died when she was a young girl. She was raised by an aunt on the south side in totally assimilated circumstances. They put up a Christmas tree at the holidays. She had a coming-out party.” Miriam and her family belonged to synagogues, but they were reform congregations.
In 1983 the Rosenbushes bought a house, and Mimi wanted her backyard to have a sukkah, a hut used during Sukkoth, the Jewish harvest festival. “Stuart felt a sukkah should be in the temple,” Mimi says. She and some friends erected a sukkah anyway. At the party afterward, she says, “Stuart sulked.”
Rosenbush doesn’t think so. But she feels a lack of devotion “leads to spiritual rootlessness,” and at 39 she has every intention of continuing her quest.
