"It was magnificent. It was the high point of my life."

Beatrice (Beatty) Rutman is describing her grandson Jesse's bar mitzvah in Israel. It was Beatty's idea to have the ceremony at the Wailing Wall. "I was taking a vacation with him anyway. Jesse was seventeen. His younger brothers had both been bar mitzvahed. So I said, 'Why don't you do it?'"

Beatty's son, Bob Dylan, joined his son and mother in Jerusalem. Also there, but not invited, was a photographer who insisted on taking a shot of Jesse praying. "I begged him not to do it," recalls Beatty. "I said, 'Can't you just leave this boy alone? Doesn't he have a right? Do you have to do this, just to make a few dollars?' But he took the picture anyway, and he wired it to New York, and it made all the papers. So then the whole world knew Bob Dylan's son had been bar mitzvahed." 

At seventy, Beatty Rutman is used to such intrusions. After all, her son is the most influential singer-songwriter of his generation (he has sold more than 30 million records) and an enigmatic figure seen by many as a rock prophet. No wonder the media's interest in Dylan has been intensive and nonstop. And since Bob himself has carefully avoided interviews for most of his career, frustrated reporters have often turned to Beatty. 

Bob's mother has rarely obliged them. "My late husband, Abe Zimmerman [Bob's father], used to say, 'You read the paper, then you put it in the fireplace.' They write what they want to write. What are you going to do, sue them? I knew Elvis Presley personally, and unfortunately, I think he really cared what they said about him in the papers. The media have made some people crazy--Bobby was smart enough to stay away from that." 

Still, Beatty was willing to speak for publication when I phoned her at her home in St. Paul, Minnesota (where she had lived with her husband of fifteen years, Joe Rutman, until his recent death). And she was willing to talk about the period, from 1979 to 1983, when the press was saying that Bob had turned into a Bible-thumping Christian. "He never displayed it for me," she says. But then Beatty adds, "What religion a person is shouldn't make any difference to anybody else. I'm not bigoted in any way. Rabbis would call me up. I'd say, 'If you're upset, you try to change him.'" 

Now, by all accounts, Bob is more actively Jewish than ever. On his most recent tour, he caused complications by refusing to perform on shabbes. In the past few years, he has spent time with Hasidic rebbes in Brooklyn, given money to Jewish causes, and made several trips to Israel, including the one for Jesse's bar mitzvah. 

Beatty spent most of her adult life in Hibbing, Minnesota, where the family moved when Bob was six. Abe Zimmerman had an appliance store, and Beatty was a popular figure in town. "All these years later," she says, "I can't walk down the street there without everybody stopping me to say hello.' 

There was no anti-Semitism in Hibbing, according to Beatty. "I got on with everyone. When a Christian friend died, they wanted to have the wake in my house, instead of in a funeral home. I said, 'Okay, but I don't serve ham.' So I made tuna salad and egg salad, and everyone was happy." 

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