Subjects · Twins
Paula Bernstein & Elyse Schein
Identical twins separated at birth and placed in different adoptive families by Louise Wise Services. Each grew up an only child in a New York Jewish home. Each was followed for years by researchers presented to the family as agency staff. They met for the first time as women in their thirties, in April 2004, and wrote the memoir that gave the study its first sustained public account from the subjects’ side.
At a Glance
- Born
- 1968, New York
- Placed
- Two separate adoptive Jewish families through Louise Wise Services
- Reunited
- April 2004, after Schein’s earlier contact with the agency led the agency to call Bernstein on April 13, 2004
- Public account
- Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited (Random House, 2007)
How they found each other
The reunion that produced their book began with Elyse Schein. As an adult living abroad in her thirties, Schein contacted Louise Wise Services for nonidentifying information about her birth mother. After a slow correspondence, the agency informed her that she had an identical twin sister. On April 13, 2004, an agency social worker called Paula Bernstein at home and told her the same thing. The two women met within days, in New York, in mid-April 2004.
The detail to hold onto is the one that distinguishes their reunion from the triplets’: the agency volunteered the existence of the sister. By 2004 the institution that had separated them was answering, on request, a question its policy had been to leave unasked. The agency did not, at that contact, explain the research program either sister had been part of. That piece was learned later, through reporting and through their own subsequent work on the book.
The book
Identical Strangers appeared in 2007 from Random House. It is structured as alternating chapters in each of the sisters’ voices and tracks the first years of their relationship — the meeting, the gradual sorting out of what they shared and how they differed, and the slower, harder work of learning what study had observed them as small children. The book is the first sustained, subject-voiced public account of the Neubauer study. It contains material gathered through the sisters’ own interviews, including with surviving figures connected to the study, and is by some distance the most complete picture of the program available before the documentaries of the 2010s.
It is also a literary work, careful in its tone, more interested in what was lost than in indictment. The combination — first-person seriousness about a wrong done to the authors, without performance — gave the study’s subjects a voice the previous quarter-century of journalism had not given them. The book remains the entry point this archive recommends most often to readers new to the topic.
Where they stand on the records
Both authors have been public, in the years since the book’s publication, in support of opening the records. Bernstein in particular has spoken in subsequent interviews and panels about the inadequacy of the current arrangement and about the position the institutions have taken. The view from inside the experience — that the materials describe their own childhoods, that they were placed in the archive without their consent, and that the institution’s privacy interest is not a substitute for the subject’s right to know — is the view this archive endorses.
Related: The book · Louise Wise Services · Advocacy