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Chapter 11
Personality
Identical Twins Reunited after 35 Years
Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were identical twins who were adopted into separate families immediately after
their births in 1968. It was only at the age of 35 that the twins were reunited and discovered how similar they were to
each other.
Paula Bernstein grew up in a happy home in suburban New York. She loved her adopted parents and older brother
and even wrote an article titled “Why I Don’t Want to Find My Birth Mother.” Elyse’s childhood, also a happy one,
was followed by college and then film school abroad.
In 2003, 35 years after she was adopted, Elyse, acting on a whim, inquired about her biological family at the adoption
agency. The response came back: “You were born on October 9, 1968, at 12:51 p.m., the younger of twin girls. You’ve
got a twin sister Paula and she’s looking for you.”
“Oh my God, I’m a twin! Can you believe this? Is this really happening?” Elyse cried.
Elyse dialed Paula’s phone number: “It’s almost like I’m hearing my own voice in a recorder back at me,” she said.
“It’s funny because I feel like in a way I was talking to an old, close friend I never knew I had...we had an immediate
intimacy, and yet, we didn’t know each other at all,” Paula said.
The two women met for the first time at a café for lunch and talked until the late evening.
“We had 35 years to catch up on,” said Paula. “How do you start asking somebody, ‘What have you been up to since
we shared a womb together?’ Where do you start?”
With each new detail revealed, the twins learned about their remarkable similarities. They’d both gone to graduate
school in film. They both loved to write, and they had both edited their high school yearbooks. They have similar taste
in music.
“I think, you know, when we met it was undeniable that we were twins. Looking at this person, you are able to gaze
into your own eyes and see yourself from the outside. This identical individual has the exact same DNA and is
essentially your clone. We don’t have to imagine,” Paula said.
Now they finally feel like sisters.
“But it’s perhaps even closer than sisters,” Elyse said, “Because we’re also twins.”