Born That Way

by William Wright

  In spite of their different backgrounds, they became best friends and relished each other’s company. In the videotaped interview, they often answered in unison or finished the other’s sentences. While responding to the questions, both nervously fingered the single strand of pearls that each wore. Both gesticulated when talking, sometimes so animatedly that they actually addressed their hands with lines like, “Can’t you be still?” Before their reunion, each had tried to control this habit by sitting on her hands. When either was anxious, they both had a long-standing habit of placing their left hands over one side of their faces. Another odd habit they shared was wrinkling their upper lip to push up their noses, a facial expression both women described with the same term: squidging. All of these anomalies were present before meeting the other.

  Also on the physiological side, they had each suffered miscarriages with their first pregnancies, then went on to give birth to three children, two boys and a girl, in the same gender order. Despite their apparent insouciance, both women took motherhood very seriously and were above average in their dedication to their children. Each had dyed her graying brown hair the same shade of auburn. Perhaps the most remarkable similarity, considering the different socioeconomic and educational levels of their upbringings, was that on I.Q. measures they tested nearly identically, even on vocabulary tests, which are generally considered, even by the genetically oriented, a domain highly influenced by the rearing environment.

  In the area of personality the similarities grew more surprising. Both women were very energetic. Both were unusually tight with money and had a reputation among their friends as penny-pinchers. As children, both had had bad falls down flights of stairs and the accidents had left both with weak ankles. As adults, both feared falling on stairs and always grabbed banisters. Heights in general frightened each of them.

  It is unnerving to think that we all might be walking around genetically programmed to fall down a flight of stairs or step into a manhole. Fortunately, logic does not insist on such fatalism. Some duplicated occurrences between twins are undoubtedly coincidence, plain and simple. Just because shared mishaps are part of a long list of parallels, many of which may have a genetic component, doesn’t mean every one of them has a genetic component. In addition, it is quite possible that some parallels were part genetic, part coincidence. Twin sisters might have accidents as children because of a genetic disposition toward clumsiness; that the accidents were the same—falling down stairs, for instance—might be pure coincidence.

  At school, Daphne and Barbara each had the same two strong dislikes: math and sports. Both had been Girl Guides. Growing up, both read a lot; the novels of Alistair Maclean and Catherine Cookson were favorites of each. They were regular listeners of the high-minded BBC instead of viewers of the more lowbrow commercial television. Both had been readers of the British periodical My Weekly but dropped it. Both had taken lessons in ballroom dancing.

  The two women drank coffee rather than the more popular tea—both taking it black, no sugar or cream. They each had a passion for chocolate and for sweet liqueurs. Blue was their favorite color. Neither had a sense of direction, and they got lost easily. Their taste in clothes was highly similar. When they arrived for their reunion at London’s Kings Cross Station, both women wore a beige dress with a brown velvet jacket. They deny any communication and insist it was a coincidence. Both felt themselves shy but appeared to others as unusually outgoing. Both were happy with their lives and could see no aspect they wished were different.

  A strong idiosyncrasy shared by the two was that they refused to assert opinions. In spite of wily efforts, the Minnesota examiners were unable to lure either twin into voicing a position on any topic the least controversial—Northern Ireland, the women’s movement, South Africa. Even though both expressed admiration for the Queen, neither would venture an opinion on the pros and cons of the monarchy or whether it should be retained—even though in England at the time, it was difficult to find anyone without an opinion on this. Neither woman had ever voted, each feeling she did not know enough about the issues; yet both had worked as polling clerks.

  The women’s life stories had striking parallels. Both met their future husbands at town hall dances when they were sixteen. Each husband-to-be worked for the municipal government; both men were described as quiet and conscientious. When they married, both twins did so in the autumn, with large church weddings complete with choirs. Everything about their courtships, marriages, and childbearing was highly similar, surprising in light of the different social classes from which they had come.

  Alike as the two women were, there were differences. On the physical side, Barbara, the gardener’s daughter, was twenty pounds heavier than her sister. While the pattern of childbearing was the same for the first three children, Barbara stopped with three, but Daphne had two more children.

  A second pair of British reared-apart twins grew up in even more widely disparate social classes than the giggle twins. The father of one girl was a lawyer, and she had been raised in an educated, refined milieu and had attended private schools. The other was a lower-class East Londoner who quit school at sixteen to take a job. According to Minnesota’s David Lykken, “One had a Cockney accent, and the other spoke like the Queen.” When submitted to Minnesota’s battery of I.Q. tests, their scores were just one point apart.

  NO MINNESOTA IDENTICAL-TWIN set attracted more media attention than Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr. Their story of widely diverse upbringings—one a Trinidadian Jew who moved to Israel, the other a Hitler Youth who grew up in Nazi Germany—contains so much intense and improbable drama, it threatens to overshadow the scientific implications of their astounding similarities. Maybe it should.

  The twins were born in Trinidad in 1933 to a Jewish father and a German Gentile mother. At the time of the boys’ birth, the parents’ marriage was breaking up; within six months the mother had returned to Germany with Oskar and an older daughter, leaving Jack with his father in Trinidad. The mother took her two children to her family’s hometown on the German-Czech border. After only a few months she left to take a job in Italy, leaving Oskar and his sister in Germany to be raised by their grandmother, a very Aryan-appearing woman—small, blonde, and blue eyed—who was a devout Catholic and insisted that Oskar be brought up Catholic as well.

  Throughout his infancy, Oskar knew he had a twin somewhere; he also knew his father was Jewish but was told by his mother and grandmother never to tell others. The initial reason was that Oskar’s mother had remarried a German Gentile who would have reacted very badly to learn his wife had previously been married to a Jew and that his stepson was half Jewish. When the Nazis came to power, secrecy became crucial as purges began, even in small border towns. To the extent that six-year-olds think about such things, Oskar thought himself a German and a Catholic. Before the war ended he reached the age at which joining the Hitler Youth was mandatory for all boys in the town.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Jack passed his boyhood as a white Trinidadian. Like Oskar, he knew he had a twin in Germany but thought little about it. His father told Jack that because he was a Jew, he would not be obliged, as his classmates were, to go to church; likewise, he could ignore the Christian activities in school and in Trinidad. Except for sporadic visits to synagogues on high holy days, these dispensations were the extent of his religious education. He was never bar mitzvahed.

  Jack was a handsome, athletic boy—a champion rower and an honored Sea Scout. He had a temper and, with his schoolmates, did not hesitate to use his fists when crossed. He admired his father, who he knew was uneducated but who he would later claim was as street-smart as anyone he had ever met. Jack was dashed, therefore, when after the war his father sent him to live with an aunt, a concentration camp survivor, in Venezuela. When Jack reached his teens, his father and aunt decided he should go to Israel, where some relatives lived on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. For a few months he stayed with the relatives and eventually wound up at a kibbutz on the Sea o
f Galilee.

  Before examining the twins’ similarities as adults, it should be noted that the abandonment of both boys during their childhood by their one remaining parent was a strong environmental element they shared, even though they were living in very different circumstances in different parts of the world. People close to Jack Yufe, for example, say they believe he holds much resentment against his father for sending him off, first to an aunt in Venezuela, then to a kibbutz in Israel—all before he was fifteen. Jack acknowledges that finding himself doing hard manual labor on a kibbutz in a strange country, he brooded about what he had done to induce his father to treat him so. Similarly, Oskar was troubled by his mother’s abandoning him to his grandmother.

  In 1954, when Jack turned twenty, he married a Sabra from the kibbutz and settled in Tel Aviv. About a year later, he heard from his father, who had moved to San Diego. He urged Jack to join him in California, saying he would set him up in business. When Jack and his wife were planning the trip, he decided the time had come to meet his brother. The two adult men made contact, then Jack booked a flight that would take them to Frankfurt, where Oskar, also married, was working in a factory.

  The reunion was not a great success. One problem was language. Oskar and his wife spoke German exclusively, so the two couples could communicate only by speaking Yiddish. In addition to being linguistically awkward, it presented more disagreeable problems. Oskar, who was trying to be cordial and familial with his brother, made it clear that it was still of the greatest importance that his Jewishness not become known. The ostensible reason was their shared mother’s husband, an anti-Semite who, even after so many years, would be unable to accept his wife’s first marriage. The suspicion was in the air, however, that Oskar, too, was fearful of having this fact of his parentage known for his own reasons.

  As the couples moved around Frankfurt, sightseeing and eating in restaurants, Oskar admonished them to speak softly because Germans can quickly hear the difference between German and Yiddish. Since this was ten years after the war, when Germans were professing shame at their savagery toward the Jews, Jack was offended at the request for subterfuge to deny who he was. This created a bitter undercurrent to a visit already made uncomfortable by two young men—foreigners to each other, strangers, political adversaries—living together for a week in a small house for no other reason than that they shared the same genes, a fact of only slight importance to them both.

  While Jack and Oskar naturally were intrigued by their physical similarity, the visit was too uncomfortable for them to sit down together and search out the numerous traits that, many years later, they would come to realize they shared. Even so, similarities were apparent. With mild interest, the men noticed that they both were highly meticulous, both liked to drink, and both had tempers. The week finally passed, and Jack and his wife left with their minds on something more important than a self-hating relative—their new life in America.

  Over the next twenty years the brothers had almost no contact—an exchange of Christmas cards each year but little more. In San Diego, Jack started a clothing business, later switching to appliances. He and his wife had two daughters but eventually split up in an angry divorce. The bitterness is significant in that his first wife, one of the few people who knew Jack before and after he met Oskar, remained hostile to her ex-husband but confirmed his account of the initial reunion with his brother. She confirmed as well the prior existence of the many tics and foibles the twins shared. Years later, when the astounding list of parallels emerged, skeptics sought to exaggerate the Frankfurt meeting as a planning session for a matched-pair spectacular the twins would stage twenty-five years later. Jack’s wife provided me with disinterested verification for their story. Because she felt little but anger toward her former husband, it is hard to believe she would help him perpetrate a pointless fraud.

  Remarried and with a new family, Jack saw his life as going well, but he had a lingering sense of unresolved business with his brother. In 1979, when he read about the Minnesota Twins Study, Jack saw an opportunity to develop their relationship. He wrote a letter telling his story and asked if Bouchard would approach his brother about participating in the study. To Jack’s surprise, Oskar agreed. The offer of a free week in America for Oskar and his wife may have overcome any resistance he may have felt about another meeting with his Jewish brother.

  Jack, now forty-five, arrived first in Minneapolis and went with Bouchard to the airport to meet the identical twin brother he had not seen in twenty-five years. When he spotted Oskar coming toward him in the terminal, he had an overpowering sense of seeing himself. Jack had expected the years to lessen their similarity, but the opposite had occurred. Not just the face, but the build, the walk, the mannerisms—everything about Oskar made Jack think he was watching a film of himself.

  Even stranger, they were both wearing the same metal-rimmed sunglasses, an odd shape, round lenses with squared-off corners. They both had closely trimmed mustaches. Both men wore blue shirts, not exactly the same—one was dark blue, the other light—but both shirts had epaulets. Perhaps most remarkable of all, the two shirts had four pockets on their fronts, two on the upper chest and two below. In spite of men’s shirts usually having a single vest pocket, sometimes two, both twins saw nothing unusual in their four pockets, saying they wore such shirts all the time as they needed the pockets to store the pencils, pads, and all the items both wanted with them at all times.

  During their week together, the duplicated traits multiplied rapidly. They discovered they shared a habit of stringing rubber bands on their wrists. They both liked to read in restaurants, and both read magazines back to front. They fell asleep quickly when watching television. Both dipped buttered toast into their coffee. One of the most specific parallels was that each twin had a habit of flushing the toilet before using it. The twins still had the fierce tempers of their childhoods. In the case of Jack, who had had problems with alcohol, his temper when drinking could turn violent. Oskar, who had given up drinking, never got physically violent, but his anger could explode into loud public scenes. In addition to the tantrums, both reported having sporadic attacks of anxiety.

  Aside from the corroboration of Jack’s ex-wife, the earlier strain between the brothers made even less likely the possibility of a hoax. Even after a day or two in Minneapolis, Jack and Oskar remained stiff with each other, and nothing about their relationship suggested a shared taste for deceptive tricks. Nor did they take much pleasure in their similar characteristics. For instance, they did not find their same get-ups at the airport funny or odd or delightful, but seemed embarrassed by the duplication and appeared to be as stunned by the coincidence as the Minnesota people. Just as police rely on a “sense” of a witness’s honesty, so do psychological researchers.

  As the week in Minneapolis progressed, the tension between the two men eased and they became close. Jack grew philosophical about Oskar’s discomfort with his Jewish roots. That this attitude was unchanged became apparent in Minneapolis when Oskar was unwilling to tell newspaper interviewers where he lived or worked. Painful as this was to Jack, he reasoned that not only had his brother been raised a Catholic; he now had a Catholic family of a wife and two sons. But more importantly, Oskar was brought up in a world when being a Jew was not only unacceptable, it was dangerous. When Oskar admitted having admired Hitler as a boy, Jack was able to muster understanding for this as well. “It shows,” Jack said, “what a smooth propaganda machine can do to children’s minds.”

  Many of the Minnesota twin parallels appeared spontaneously during their week’s stay in Minneapolis. The impromptu emergence of these phenomena increased the difficulty of ever measuring them in a scientific manner, or indeed of ever knowing beyond doubt they were not rehearsed by twins eager to astound. To that criticism the Minnesotans respond that the revelations appeared convincingly inadvertent, as did the twins’ astonishment at the discoveries. The parallels surfaced in a series of chance utterances and were met with stunned reactions t
hat, had they been counterfeit, would have required elaborate scripting and considerable acting skills.

  A good example of a serendipitous parallel occurred one evening during their Minneapolis week when Jack and Oskar, out of curiosity, decided to visit a hypnotist. Seated in an office with their wives, the hypnotist waited until the room was totally silent, then began counting backward to induce trances. Suddenly, Oskar sneezed very noisily, shattering the somber mood. With weary exasperation his wife said to the others, “He does that all the time. It’s his idea of a joke.”

  Jack Yufe felt a chill. For years when he found himself in crowded elevators, standing silently and shoulder to shoulder with a group of strangers, he would feel an irresistible urge to fake a loud sneeze and usually did so. It amused him enormously to blast the self-imposed solemnity of random humans being mechanically hauled from one floor to another. Jack knew this was an odd quirk. That his brother had the same quirk was, for him, more than merely odd—as it was, needless to say, for Bouchard and the others at the University of Minnesota Psychology Department.

  SOME OF THE STRANGE matched behaviors were discovered by twins before they arrived in Minneapolis. Other times, the parallels emerged during research interviews; then too, they might turn up in casual conversations between the twins or in reactions to shared events, like Jack and Oskar’s trip to the hypnotist. No matter how hard the Minnesotans tried to hide their fascination with these phenomena, the twins inevitably came to realize that the matching behaviors made them more interesting, which raised the possibility of prevarication. The giggle twins had, in fact, collaborated on such a lie when they claimed they had both aspired to sing opera. While clearly done in fun, it was the kind of deliberate distortion, having sport with the researcher and his tedious questions, that could skew results. It was this sort of hoodwinking of nosy scientists that appears to have led Margaret Mead so far astray in Samoa (discussed in chapter 12). Researchers of humans are often at the mercy of their subjects’ veracity and can mistakenly assume they take the investigation as seriously as do the investigators.