Twins: lost and found
Identical sisters were adopted separately and subjected to secret testing

Zosia Bielski, National Post
Published: Monday, October 22, 2007

Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein are quintessential identical twins. They finish each other's sentences. They have the same laughing brown eyes, the same button nose. They stare inquiringly and speak in eloquent, confident tones -- both are writers. The same mannerisms and idiosyncrasies coil through their identical DNA.

But unlike most twins aged 39, quizzed all their lives about their purported psychic powers and other falsehoods, Ms. Schein and Ms. Bernstein are still delighted by the mystique of their twinship.

That is because their twinship is remarkably fresh: The sisters did not meet until three years ago.

Born Oct. 9, 1968, the girls were given up to Louise Wise Services, a Jewish adoption agency in New York, the following year. In a unique decision, the agency opted to separate the twins, a fact it concealed from their adoptive parents.

More disturbing, the girls' development -- everything from their IQ to their speech, to their playtime -- was to be tested, filmed and analyzed in a clandestine study handled by Louise Wise and prominent New York psychiatrists.

At the heart of the study was the question of nature versus nurture, namely the interplay between environment and one's genetic potential. Conducted on five pairs of separated twins and one set of triplets, researchers sought to determine what roles their identical genes and disparate rearing would bear on their identities.

The question, as well as the practice, is chronicled in Ms. Schein and Ms. Bernstein's book, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited, published this month.

It was Dr. Viola Bernard, Louise Wise Service's leading psychiatric consultant who pushed the unsubstantiated theory that triplets and twins would do better if raised apart, insisting it would help them shape distinct personalities. Their parents, Dr. Bernard reasoned, would not have to bear the burden of raising more than one child at once.

The subsequent study was a collaboration between Dr. Bernard and her colleague Dr. Peter Neubauer, director of the Child Development Centre and the Freud archives. Dr. Neubauer, who was also a renowned psychiatrist at New York University's Psychoanalytic Institute, saw Louise Wise's access to orphaned twins and triplets as a unique opportunity, and also tried to recruit twins from other agencies.

In the case of the triplets, their adoptive families would travel separately to the centre once a month for 12 years for IQ tests and speech analysis. Researchers would also visit their homes and film their children playing.

The parents -- who were never given the option to adopt the twins or the triplets -- were told they were part of a child development study, but kept in the dark about the twin/ triplet aspect. The controversial study has not been published, but will be in 2066, when most of the participants will likely be dead.

Although she requested non-identifying information about her biological family in 1987, Ms. Bernstein says she was not particularly interested in finding her birth mother, and even wrote a personal essay about it in Redbook magazine. The journalist vociferated that her adoptive parents, not the "two strangers who haphazardly created me and then gave me up," were her real parents.

Since meeting Ms. Schein, Ms. Bernstein has shifted some of her views.

"In some ways, I realize now, I had gone overboard on the idea that the person I had become had been entirely shaped by the environment, by nurture. I really felt like the genetic component played no role in shaping my identity, which now I see, was a fallacy," she says, glancing over at her sister.

The book alternates between each sister's point of view, and a substantial portion is devoted to a feverish catalogue of their similarities and differences, perhaps itself a modern-day answer to the study Ms. Bernstein and Ms. Schein were only briefly subjected to -- they were pulled out while still in foster care.

For instance, for most of their adult lives, the women were told they looked like actress Ally Sheedy. Although their tastes in food differ highly, both women suffered violent allergic reactions to an antibiotic called sulfa. Both studied film and now hold similar political and religious views, a point that echoes one of many comparative surveys referenced in the book. According to the political science study, conducted on 8,000 sets of twins, 66% of identical pairs shared similar political views, compared with 46% of fraternal pairs.

The book is also a rumination on chance. The prospect of seeing her double in the street is one that Ms. Schein, a filmmaker, now compares to a scene from one of her favourite films, Krzysztof Kieslowski's La Double Vie de Veronique. In it, a young French woman watches her double board a streetcar in Poland.

In fact, both Ms. Bernstein and Ms. Schein did spend part of 1995 on the same cobblestone streets in Paris and frequented the same art film house in Manhattan.

An imagined doppelganger encounter also bolstered Katherine Boros, Louise Wise's director of post-adoption services, to help reunite the twins.

"But what if you were walking down Fifth Avenue and bumped into yourself ?" Ms. Boros reasoned to Ms. Bernstein, as she arranged the unconventional meeting.

Ultimately, the reunion raised serious questions for both women regarding the idea that identity is distinct.

"Growing up, we didn't know any biological relatives at all. We were used to being unique," Ms. Schein said.

Ahead of their first meeting in a Turkish-styled cafe in New York's East Village during a dramatic thunderstorm, each twin suffered a profound existential crisis.

"I am uneasy at the thought of losing my individuality ... I also fear that my twin will be an improved version of me," Ms. Schein writes. "Thank God she is not my carbon copy," Ms. Bernstein thinks when she spots her sister.

At the cafe, the women appraised each other so clinically that it could only be family. "We study each other like monkeys in a zoo," writes Ms. Schein. "Yep, cute pug nose, but hers turns up slightly more," writes Ms. Bernstein, who also notes that her sister's neck "flushes red when she gets excited just like mine."

Later, the two wondered who they would be had they switched adoptive parents, or been brought up in the same family.

"While for sure we should have been raised together, we wouldn't want to give up the lives that we've led," Ms. Bernstein said.

Since 1985, New York State has required adoption agencies to keep siblings together. Both women now live in Brooklyn.

zbielski@nationalpost.com

© National Post 2007