Long
Lost Twins, Reunited
The East Village Mamele
Marjorie
Ingall | Tue. Oct 02, 2007
Human
beings have always been fascinated by
twins. Romulus and Remus, Jacob and Esau,
Mary-Kate and Ashley. We love ultrasound
images of twins hugging (or punching)
in utero, stories about shared secret
languages, notions of twin-to-twin ESP,
movies like “The Parent Trap.”
(But c’mon, identical cousins? That’s
crazy talk!)
As children, many of us fantasized about
having a twin: a perpetual playmate, a
partner in mischief, someone who’d
love us unconditionally. Even for adults,
the notion of identical twins separated
at birth is emotionally resonant. There’s
a reason it’s a theme in fairy tales
and folk tales, stories that speak to
our psyches’ most powerful needs.
Somewhere out there is someone who is
exactly like us! What would it feel like
to look into a face exactly like our own?
Would my twin share my love of mid-century
modern design, my fascination with Morocco,
my encyclopedic memory of the names of
minor ’70s actors who guest-starred
on “The Love Boat”?
And
what if she suddenly materialized in my
life?
That’s
essentially what happened to Brooklyn
writer Paula Bernstein. I’d known
Paula slightly for years; she wrote a
lovely essay for Redbook many years ago
refuting the persistent belief that all
adoptees want to search for their birth
parents. Her adoptive family was her family,
she wrote; her adoptive mother was her
mother. But then, out of the blue, an
adoption agency called her and told her
about the identical twin sister she didn’t
know she had. Her sister wanted to meet
her. Thrilled and terrified, she headed
to Café Mogador in the East Village
of Manhattan to make the acquaintance
of Elyse Schein. And in their new book
“Identical Strangers: A Memoir of
Twins Separated and Reunited” (Random
House), they write, in alternating chapters,
about their experience of finding each
other and their origins.
I
met them for coffee at Café Mogador,
three years after their first meeting.
Now 38, they have different haircuts,
have made different choices in hair color,
do their makeup differently. But they
clearly look alike, with thick hair, upturned
noses, slender but curvy frames. They
quickly discovered they had the same childhood
habit of sucking their middle fingers,
the same adult habit of absentmindedly
typing their thoughts on an invisible
keyboard while pondering. Both edited
their high school newspapers and studied
film in college. Paula wrote film criticism;
Elyse became a filmmaker. They both collected
Alice in Wonderland dolls and kept them
in the boxes — a fitting pastime
for two young women who slipped down a
rabbit hole into a confusing, sometimes
frightening adventure.
They’re
now regulars at Café Mogador. The
waiter greets them warmly; they show him
an advance copy of their book and tell
him what it’s about. He begins fluttering
his hands and gasps, “Oh my God,
zat makes my heart beat so fast! Oh my
God, zat is awesome!”
Well,
it is and it isn’t. As Paula writes,
“Once you find someone, you can’t
unfind her.” The women’s journey
from strangers to sisters has clearly
been rocky. Paula is the straight-arrow
sister, the married mom of two with the
comfortable bourgeois life. Elyse is the
dreamer, the vagabond, the solo seeker
who’s lived a boho life in Paris,
trying on a variety of jobs. But as they
got to know each other, and struggled
to piece together their history, their
quest united them.
“For me, the search began when I
reached the age when my adoptive mother
died — 33,” Elyse said. “I
realized that my birth mother could be
dead. Time was passing. I was ready to
unravel the mystery that had shadowed
my life.” Elyse had always felt
a part of her was missing. “I’d
felt so different from my adoptive family,”
she said. “They weren’t interested
in the arts or reading or travel. Growing
up in Oklahoma I would look for the Village
Voice and Interview magazine, and listen
to Suzanne Vega. I always felt drawn to
New York.”
Paula
was raised in a more typical Jewish intellectual
family, and was at first a little threatened
by Elyse’s appearance in her life.
“My initial response was both fear
and excitement. The moment we met, I felt
I was meeting my long-lost best friend.
I could tell her anything. And then as
that initial exhilaration wore off, I
thought, oh my God, I’ve committed
to a long-term relationship with a stranger.
I felt protective of my life. I wished
we hadn’t been separated, but also
that I hadn’t been contacted. What
would it mean to be in each other’s
lives?”
Much
of “Identical Strangers” is
a detective story, with Paula and Elyse
trying to find the truth about their origins.
They were both adopted from the Louise
Wise Agency, the premier upscale Jewish
adoption agency on the Upper East Side.
(It closed in 2004.) The girls were placed
in homes of similar socioeconomic class.
Both had older brothers adopted from the
agency. Neither of their families was
informed that the daughter they were adopting
was an identical twin. Researchers came
to their homes to study them, but the
families weren’t told why. Slowly,
Paula and Elyse uncover yet another disturbing
fact: They were part of a secret study
of identical twins reared apart.
The
study’s lead researcher was Viola
Bernard, a famous psychologist and one
of the first women to graduate from Cornell
Medical School. Bernard was the daughter
of Jacob Wertheim, a wealthy German-Jewish
businessman and philanthropist. She lived
in an ashram from 1926 to 1930 and studied
yoga and Eastern philosophy long before
they were trendy. During World War II,
she housed refugees from Nazi Germany
in her summer home in Nyack, N.Y. Shortly
after Elyse and Paula’s birth, she
was elected vice president of the American
Psychiatric Association. Bernard fervently
believed that identical twins fared better
when reared apart and allowed to develop
without being constantly compared to their
sibling, despite the prevailing thinking
(then and now) that it was unethical to
separate twins. But Bernard’s childhood
friend Justine Wise Polier, the daughter
of Louise Wise and Stephen Wise (founder
of the influential Free Synagogue), ran
the Louise Wise Agency after her mother’s
death and allowed Bernard to do her research.
“This
agency was funded by the organized Jewish
community and founded to protect the welfare
of Jewish children,” Paula said.
“It
was run by super-progressive philanthropist
intellectuals. How could they do this?”
Paula
and Elyse tracked down several other separated
multiples who were part of the secret
study. But what, exactly, was Bernard
looking for? The archives are sealed at
Yale University until 2066; Paula and
Elyse petitioned, unsuccessfully, to be
allowed access. They spoke to Bernard’s
colleague, an elderly psychologist named
Peter Neubauer, who was furious at being
questioned and less than forthcoming.
Paula writes that after learning shocking
things about the conditions of her early
life, and after being stonewalled and
yelled at by a God-playing scientist with
a Middle European accent, she thought
momentarily about Josef Mengele’s
twin studies.
I
don’t want to spoil the detective
story by telling you what else the sisters
discovered, or whether they found their
birth mother.
“As
close as we are and as unique and special
as our bond is, there will always be a
tinge of sadness that we can’t ever
complete our process,” Paula said.
“We can never get those 35 years
back,” Elyse continued. The women
frequently complete each other’s
thoughts, even though they’ve only
known each other a short time.
Both women still feel adamantly that their
adoptive families are their real families.
“Giving birth doesn’t make
you family; it’s raising and supporting
children that do that,” Paula said.
Paula and Elyse were lucky to be raised
by parents who wanted and loved them.
And giving up a child to adoption can
be a courageous, noble choice. But there’s
nothing noble about keeping whole families
in the dark.
Write
to Marjorie at mamele@forward.com.
