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Friday October 26, 2007

Guess what? You’re a twin

Memoir explores how sisters built relationship midlife

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

A certified letter from the adoption agency arrives in your mailbox. You are expecting it. You assume it contains information about your birth mother.

The letter says: “You were born at 12:51 p.m. as the younger of twin girls born to a 28-year-old Jewish single woman.”

Until that moment, at age 35, you had no idea you were one of two — a twin, a pair.

This is not the stuff of movies. This is real life. It happened to Elyse Schein, a writer and filmmaker who lives in Brooklyn. And it’s the subject of the book she wrote with her identical twin sister, Paula Bernstein, also a writer living in Brooklyn.

“Identical Strangers,” published in October, is part memoir (How does learning about a twin you never knew about affect your identity?), part mystery (Why were we separated and why didn’t anybody know?). The story unfolds in two voices. Consequently, the reader gets to sort through each woman’s thoughts, learning about their lives from both perspectives.

“The concept of kin eluded me,” Schein wrote. “Do people related by blood recognize each other on some basic primal level?”

The book explores the twins’ journey into sisterhood and into their past: Soon after meeting, they learned they were separated because of a secret study — now illegal — on nature versus nurture, conceived in the 1960s.

Together the women investigate the details of this secret study and come to learn that the chief psychiatric counselor at Louise Wise Adoption Agency had “an unusual notion not accepted at the time and unsubstantiated by research that twins are better off raised separately,” Bernstein told j. during a conference call that included Schein.

The women sound so alike that they have to state who is speaking each time they answer a question.

“We were undeniably twins, but were we sisters?” Bernstein said. “What would the future of our relationship be? We had to work through that.

“Obviously we can’t make up for the 30 years we missed, but we have the rest of our lives to try,” she continued. “So we recently started experiencing some of the things we would have done together as teens, like shopping expeditions.”

“Our bond has solidified by working on this book,” Schein added. “Through this whole journey, this discovery, I’ve realized ‘twins’ is just a clinical way of saying we’re related, linked by blood. Now we’re 20 minutes away by bus, have a very warm relationship and are part of each other’s lives.”

Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein will appear at 3:45 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4, at the JCCSF. Free. Info: www.jccsf.org/bookfest.

“Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited” by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein (288 pages, Random House, $25.95)

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