Abigail Pogrebin

Oct 2009

Link: The Daily Beast

Dr. Mengele's Twins
by Abigail Pogrebin
October 28, 2009 | 10:24pm
In an excerpt from her new book, One and the Same, Abigail Pogrebin talks to twin sisters who survived the Nazi doctor's monstrous experiments at Auschwitz.


"If not for her, I wouldn't be here."

Helen Rapaport declares this in a heavy Yiddish accent, looking over at her identical twin sister, Pearl Pufeles. The two eighty-six-year-olds are sitting side by side in a Chicago hospital lounge on a patterned sofa. Helen is wearing a green floor-length hospital gown and medical bracelet—unexpectedly, she was kept overnight for some cardiac tests, so our interview has to take place here. She is frustrated that we're not meeting in her home in Buffalo Grove, as planned. “I cooked all day yesterday,” she says ruefully.

“She made kugel,” offers Pearl, who is dressed in a purple ensemble—purple polyester pants, purple top with flower appliqué on the left shoulder—and cream-colored orthopedic sneakers.

“Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”

Both twins fold their hands in front of them when they talk. They don't look nearly as identical now as they do in the black-and-white pictures from their youth; in those, they are indistinguishable, wearing identical outfits well into their twenties. What remains similar about them today is their thinning hair, their drooping eyelids—which give their faces a soft kindness that reminds me of my late grandma Esther—and the blue numbers tattooed on their arms: Helen is 5080; Pearl is 5079.

I thought I'd have to ease gingerly into their memories of Dr. Josef Mengele—the monstrous Nazi doctor who experimented on twins in Auschwitz. But they start talking about him right away.

One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to be Singular. By Abigail Pogrebin. 288 pages. Doubleday. $26.95. “You've heard about him,” Pearl says. “He was the one who called out when we got off of the train.” She refers to the cattle car that transported prisoners to the camps. “He called out, 'Zwillinge austreten,' which means 'Twins, step out.' And we were pushed aside. I don't know, there were about seventy sets of twins.”

“More,” Helen corrects her. “More.”

In his 1986 book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton describes how Mengele, who had a Ph.D. in genetics, “embodied the selections process” for many survivors, who remember him always at “the ramp” when the transports arrived. “...He frequently went to the ramp when not selecting in order to see that twins were being collected and saved for him,” Lifton writes. “Mengele could exploit the unique opportunity Auschwitz provided for quick and absolute availability of large numbers of these precious research subjects.”

“They took the twins to a different barracks,” Pearl continues. “And we didn't know what was waiting for us.”

“We didn't know first if we should tell him we were twins,” Helen recalls.

“We didn't know what they were going to do with us,” Pearl repeats.

“But we were so identical, they would have known anyway,” Helen explains. “So Pearl said, 'Let's just step out. Whatever will be with one will be with the other.' So that's how we wound up in the barracks with other twins.”

They had been herded, at the age of twenty-three, from their home in Czechoslovakia, along with their father, Isaac Herskovic—“a top tailor,” Pearl says—and a brother, Morris, an older sister, Miriam, and Miriam's husband and three children. (Their mother, Hannah, had died years earlier of a stroke, and their four other siblings were already in other parts of the world by the time the war began.)

The train journey was gruesome. “Terrible.” Helen shakes her head. “They piled us up; I don't know how many. There was no air, no water.”

“And kids crying,” Pearl adds. “There was no food.”

“It was locked,” Helen continues. “No washroom, nothing. A pail in one end and a pail in the other. You have to relieve yourself in front of the whole car. It was degrading, terribly.”

“My sister had an onion,” Pearl recalls. “And she passed it around to have a lick. Just a lick. And her kids cried and cried.”

“Miriam said, 'I only want to live as long as I have food for the children,' ” Helen adds.

“And she went right away,” Pearl says flatly, meaning Miriam was killed almost as soon as she arrived at the concentration camp. “The ones who they pushed to the left,” Helen explains, “they were doomed. Straight to the crematorium.”

“They gassed them,” Pearl says.

“They gave them a towel,” Helen chimes in, “and a soap to make believe they were going for a shower, and then when they were inside—”

“—instead of water,” Pearl interjects.

“—the Zyclon gas came down.” Helen's hands are in a fist against her belly.

“That's how my father and my sister and her children died,” Pearl says. “We never saw them anymore.”

The twins didn't understand their relatives' fate at first.

Pearl: “There were women in the barracks from Poland.”

Helen: “They had been already years there.”

Pearl: “They told us.”

Helen: “We asked, 'When will we be reunited with our loved ones?' And she said--”

Helen starts to weep.

Pearl: “They took us by our hand and opened the barracks door—”

Helen: “—and showed us the chimneys. We were a couple feet away from the crematoriums. 'There is where they are,' they said.”

Pearl: “'You will never see them again.' And we started crying.”

Helen: “We didn't believe it; we said, 'How is that possible?' They told us, 'No, you won't see them.' The Polish people were already there like four or five years; they knew how everything worked. So we cried and cried and hugged. And that was it.”

After a week or so in the barracks, the Herskovic twins received a grisly assignment.

“They needed some workers to volunteer,” Pearl recalls. “And Helen and I said, 'Well, maybe if we get out of the barracks, we'll see our brother. Let's volunteer wherever they are taking us.'”

“So we volunteered,” Helen continues. “Two SS men came with dogs and brought two pails and some disinfectant, and they took us to a big warehouse, and we thought we were going to do some work. And then they opened the door and we almost fainted. Oh my God.”

“There was a mountain of bodies,” Pearl recounts. “Dead bodies. We almost fainted, both. Because we never saw dead people before. In the Jewish religion, they didn't display dead bodies; always the casket was closed.”

“So one—the SS man with the dogs—he said, 'Oh, you'll get used to it,'” Helen says.

“We'll see it in our minds until we die,” Pearl says quietly. “Just a big, big mountain. And our job was to first pile them—the Germans were very correct with making everything perfect. So when they dumped the bodies out after they were gassed, they scattered. It wasn't a neat mountain.”

The young women were told to make a neat stack of corpses. “We had to lift them onto the pile,” Helen explains, “wash the floor where the bodies had been, then pile them back on the clean side and wash the other. And the worst thing was that we saw children.” She starts to weep again.

“Because we were looking,” Pearl remembers. “Thinking, Maybe we'll see our nieces.”

“The mouths open,” Helen recounts, “and blood was still coming. They must have been gassed a few hours before.”

“That was Mengele who was doing the selections,” Pearl recalls. “He was waving his wand—whatever you call it. To the right, you still have a chance of living. To the left, all the elderly, the sick, the little ones, they all went to the left and those were taken straight with the towels.”

I ask Pearl to describe Mengele, and her eyes light up. “He was the most handsomest—”

“Like Clark Gable,” Helen interjects.

“He was tall and the most handsome guy,” Pearl continues. “He should have been an actor or something and not killed Jews. His boots-—they were so shiny that instead of a mirror, you could have used his boots.”

The boots clearly made an impression. “They were cleaned like three times a day,” Helen goes on. “And he changed always his uniforms. He was the most handsomest guy. I don't think Clark Gable was as handsome as he was.”

“No,” Pearl says definitively. “Walking around with a little—what is it called? Swagger?”

“Even the prisoners,” Helen says. “Some of them fell in love with him.”

The twins cleaned the warehouse for twelve days.

“Then Mengele needed us for his experiments,” Pearl says.

“Toward the end, you didn't know it was bodies anymore,” Helen says dully. “I said to Pearl, 'Pretend it's a sack of potatoes. Or a sack of onions.' To this day, if we go shopping and we want to pick out some oranges...” She pauses. “To this day, sometimes if I pick up an orange and I see it sliding, I'm right back in Auschwitz. Or potatoes or pumpkins. Anything that's on a pile. You can't help it.”

They keep focusing on the fact that at least they had each other. “We had to do the job,” Pearl says. “But we were together. We were always together.”

Did they talk to each other a lot while they worked?

“We were quiet,” Helen replies.

Their memories of the Nazi doctor are incredibly benign. “Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”

He took their medical history and measured them meticulously. “We were sitting like Pearl and I are now, and he was in the middle,” Helen recounts. “We were always nude.”

“No clothes,” Pearl confirms.

“Because he measured us,” Helen explains.

“Every single thing,” Pearl adds.

“Even our hair was counted,” Helen marvels. “The eyelashes. He was measuring Pearl; then he came to me, and vice versa. Everything was written down.”

Mengele left the injections to his nurses. The sisters don't know what the needles contained, but they do remember blood being drawn constantly. “They were taking our blood every single day,” Pearl says, “and so Helen asked one of the nurses, 'How much blood can they take?' And she said, 'Endless. You have plenty blood.'”

“'You always make more,' ” Pearl recalls the nurse explaining.

“One nurse was taking blood from one way; the other was injecting us with monstrosities that we don't know.” Helen shakes her head. “To this day. And we never will find out, because all the records are gone.”

But Mengele himself was never cruel to them?

“Never,” they say in unison.

They said he was almost fatherly. “We knew he's not going to harm us. We knew it.”

“Because he was so handsome,” Pearl says. “You forgot about anything.”

“He was like an angel,” Helen adds.

“We were like friends with him,” Pearl says. “Really.”

“He was very smart,” Helen says. “People were falling in love with him; I'm not kidding.”

Their report is consistent with those of other twin survivors who said Mengele was their protector as much as their persecutor. The twins weren't treated any better than other prisoners in terms of being fed or clothed, but they were rarely outwardly harmed—in order to keep their bodies intact for comparisons—and they were allowed to keep their hair (so Mengele could measure and analyze it), which preserved a shred of humanity. Mengele prized the twins as case studies for investigating genetics; some say it was to understand how to engineer a master race with ideal traits; others say it was to devise a way to mass-produce twins to repopulate Germany. His laboratory had to be spotless, and his assistants were often Jewish prisoners.

Lifton writes that, by all accounts, Mengele was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure, who one minute was offering children sweets and a ride in his car, and the next minute driving those same kids to the crematorium. He was known to give a pat on the head but also to inject twins' eyeballs, cut off a twin's testicles, or kill one twin immediately after the other twin died, in order to contrast autopsies. “They wanted to compare if the insides were as identical as the outside,” Helen explains. Lifton describes how Mengele injected twins with chloroform to stop their hearts, and one incident when Mengele shot two of his “favorite” twin boys—eight years old—in the neck and autopsied them on the spot, in order to resolve a dispute with other doctors as to whether they carried tuberculosis. (They didn't.) In one infamous operation, Mengele is said to have sewed two Gypsy twins together to create conjoined twins.

Helen says she was “sick for years” after the war, but doctors were stymied as to the cause, and they kept sending her to psychiatrists. “They all think, if you're a survivor, there must be something wrong with your mind,” Helen says. “But I knew it was something drastically wrong with me. It wasn't my head.” Finally one doctor deduced that she had TB in the bladder. “He calls me up on a Monday morning; I'll always remember the day. He says, 'Helen, I finally know what's wrong with you and you're not crazy.' I started crying.”

After the sisters had spent a year in Auschwitz, in January 1945, it became clear that the Germans were losing the war. “The Russians were approaching and the Americans from the other side,” Helen recounts. “The Nazis evacuated the camps. They didn't want no evidence. But they left hundreds of people in beds who couldn't walk. Whoever was able to walk, they chased out. And we were in that death march that lasted from January to—when were we liberated?”

“May,” Pearl replies.

“April,” Helen corrects her.

“When they took us for the march,” Pearl goes on, “it was our birthday: January eighteenth.”

“I said to Pearl, 'We never will forget this day.'”

They marched in frigid temperatures. “There was no food, no water, nothing,” says Pearl, describing the march. “So wherever we were walking, the snow disappeared.”

“Because we ate up all the snow,” Helen explains. “We slept in sties and warehouses. No taking baths, no changing clothes. We were walking around like crazy people.”

Pearl says some of the German onlookers threw bread when their ragged convoy passed by. “When a prisoner ran toward the people that were throwing bread,” Helen says, “the SS shoot them right on the spot.”

They actually saw that happen?

“All the time,” Pearl replies.

“That was daily,” Helen states. “In that march, people were laying like flies all over. A lot of people couldn't take all that walking. I don't know, to this day, how I made it. I couldn't tell you. It was just—I don't know—God was pushing me.”

“You said, 'Let me lay down here,'” Pearl reminds Helen.

“Because I was very sick,” Helen says. “And I didn't want to go on. I didn't have shoes. My feet were wrapped in rags. No clothes. And we were freezing. And I just wanted to give up. I couldn't walk anymore.” She looks at Pearl. “So she dragged me.”

“If you can picture a skeleton,” Pearl tells me. “She was a skin-colored skeleton. And so many people were lying dead on the road; we were hungry and she couldn't walk. And she said, 'Just put me down here.'”

“'Let me die,'” Helen recounts.

“'And if you survive,'” Pearl continues, repeating her sister's words to her, “'you'll tell the world what happened to us.'”

Helen picks up the story: “Pearl said to me, 'You cannot die. Because if you die, I'll die.'”

“So I told her,” Pearl continues, “'Put your arms around my neck.' I couldn't carry her; I was skinny, too.”

“So she dragged me,” Helen says.

“She was holding on to me.” Pearl's voice breaks. “And we survived.” She leans over to kiss her sister. It's a little awkward to do over the tape recorder I've placed between them, but she doesn't let it get in her way, planting a little wrinkled pucker on Helen's cheek. Helen kisses her right back.

Sitting with these two, I am aware of one overriding thought: Twinship need not be layered or loaded. It can be simple. Every bleak day that these sisters survived the camps, they reminded themselves, At least we are together. And in a world of unimaginable horror, that was enough. More than enough: It kept them alive.

“We survived together,” Pearl goes on with wet eyes. “So we have two of us. We were never separated. Even when Mengele worked on us. We were always together. So we're lucky.”

Excerpted from One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin Copyright © 2009 by Abigail Pogrebin. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Plus: Check out Book Beast for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Abigail Pogrebin is the author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. A Yale graduate, she has written for many national publications and has produced for Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, and Fred Friendly. She lives with her husband and two children in Manhattan—as does her identical twin, New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-28/dr-mengeles-twins/p/

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How does one write personally about being an identical twin without exposing one’s twin in the process? 

            I discovered it’s impossible.

            I set out to write a book—ultimately titled One and the Same—which told the unvarnished truth about growing up as a double, a project which meant burying myself in mountains of articles, studies and tomes by virtually every twins expert in the world, and interviewing twin after twin about what the experience was really like.

            But over the course of two years of work, I realized that every question I asked as a reporter was fueled by my own questions as a twin. 

            Every study made me think about myself.

            Every revelation about genetics, biology, or child-rearing was heard or deciphered personally.

            I couldn’t escape my own perspective, no matter how impartial I tried to be.  And my outlook was not an uncomplicated, rosy view of twinship; there were hurdles and landmines to being raised in tandem, which I felt I needed to examine.  Though Robin and I are still deeply, unshakably close, we’ve had fissures which mirrored those described by other twins I spoke to.  Twinship can get in the way of friendship, especially when one’s identity has been muddled or blurred or by having a constant carbon-copy by whom everyone is measuring you.

            I quickly saw that the spine of the book had to be my own story, because readers relate to real experience, not just research, and because my lifetime with Robin was the lens through which I was learning.

            The hitch was that deciding to speak honestly about myself meant implicating another person: my sister.  And that was tricky territory for us to navigate and discuss.  Robin writes for the New York Times and always prefers to maintain a reporter’s remove.   Though she encouraged my book from its inception, she wasn’t the one who had decided to write it; suddenly our relationship was being revealed in a way she hadn’t necessarily planned and sometimes she balked at the disclosures.

Because I anticipated Robin’s misgivings, I tread carefully through the process: instead of summarizing her feelings in the book, I interviewed her formally—as I would any subject—and let our Q & A exchange stand alone and apart from the other interviews in the book, without editorial comment.  I made sure that she spoke for herself and then read every word more than once.  I let her excise anything that made her squirm.  

But even tiptoeing as I did, what I couldn’t forsee was that writing even part of the book as memoir meant a leap into vulnerability, and it’s difficult to take that leap for someone else.   Now that the book is out, friends and colleagues are emailing or calling Robin, asking the same question: “Are you okay with this?”  And every time she’s asked that question, I worry she regrets having given me her blessing in the first place.

The truth is, I think her greatest act of love and loyalty is that she not only edited the book and allowed her candor to remain in it, but she let me go ahead and publish it.  That was not just an act of bravery but fidelity.  Recently, I received a note from a friend who had just finished the book: “It’s clearly a love letter to Robin,” he wrote.  “She must be very proud.”

The truth is, I’m not sure exactly how she feels about it and I think it’s better to wait to ask her.  What I do know is that she’s very much still at my side, no matter what her ambivalence may be.  And I also know that as familiar as we were before this book, we know a lot more now.  So maybe the greatest exposure, at the end of the day, has been to each other. 

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"Painful honesty and scary insight."

-Patricia Niemeyer

Link: Gemini Crickets - Parents of Multiples Clubs of Silicon Valley

Abigail Pogrebin’s latest book “One and the Same” details a unique perspective of the phenomenon of twins with sometimes painful honesty and scary insight. As a mother of three year old twins, I find most of my decisions limited to toddler-focused issues like how to get my kids to eat vegetables or which preschool to enroll them in or how to discipline them. Abigail’s book is a wake up call that the well being of my children involves much more than meals, academics, and obedience.  Crucial to my children’s happiness and overall health is their sense of identity.  Abigail raises issues specific to “twinship” that I had mistakenly tried to ignore hoping that if I ignored the fact that they were twins it wouldn’t matter. Backed by scientific research, she points out time and again how the very existence of two individuals fostered in one womb and born only minutes apart will always be an immovable defining relationship.  She has extensively interviewed physicians and researchers who concur that there are ways that parents can help foster healthy twin relationships.

But Abigail’s book is much more than a compilation of research facts and data.  She has included the personal stories of a variety of twins.  Some have gained strength from their twinship, such as the professional football players or the Holocaust survivors she interviewed.  Some have deviated drastically from the twinship, in one case going so far as to change genders.  And some have lost their twin, whether in the womb or later on in life from disease, suicide, or tragedy such as September 11th, with devastating consequences and subsequent moral dilemmas.  Some of these stories are encouraging and reassuring while others are cautionary tales for me.  I find myself insinuating my perspective as a mother into each of these stories feeling a gamut of emotions from elation and joy to overwhelming fear and sadness.  God willing my children will grow up to have a story of their own to tell.

Perhaps what I applaud Abigail Pogrebin the most for is her courage to reveal the intimate details of her life in print.  She is an Ivy League educated accomplished writer and producer who lays bare her own twin angst for all to read.  To my surprise, her relationship with her own twin Robin is less than ideal and Abigail is not afraid to address it.  In fact, her analysis of her relationship with her twin sister is the thread that holds this engaging book together.  I feel as though I travel the journey with her and, in doing so, get to sneak a peek into a life that I, as a non-twin, will never experience or fully understand.  In the end, thanks to Abigail’s beautiful writing, I get the privilege of being that much closer to my children.  Thank you, Abigail.

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"Pogrebin's words seemed spot on..."

-Sarah Kliff

Link: The Twin Stands Alone

Abigail and Robin Pogrebin’s childhood as identical twins reads like a symmetrical storybook: Robin dressed in red, Abby in blue. They slept near each other in cribs, then bunk beds, shared birthday cakes and ate the same number of Oreos after school. The Pogrebins attended Yale together, graduated, and moved into an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And when people inquire, “What was it like growing up a twin?” Abby gives her standard answer: “It was great.” And it was, she says, but that three-word answer betrays a complicated, nuanced relationship. “I never explain ... that Robin has spent the past five years pulling away from me. Or that I want more of her,” Abby writes in her new book, One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday, 2009). Being a twin, Pogrebin explains to me over the phone, “looks idyllic in many ways because so many people idealize it. While I do think a lot of that is true, it comes along with more intensity and complexity than I ever found explored in anything that had been written.”
So Pogrebin set out to explore it herself, hoping to understand her relationship with Robin by speaking with other twins and the experts who study them. She spent two years meeting with more than 40 sets, from NFL football players Tiki and Ronde Barber to Holocaust survivors to conceptual artists. “I found that unpacking twinship means exposing the tension between being one and the same,” Pogrebin writes near the end of her book. “I’ve tried to explore what it takes to ultimately forge individuality, but I also set out to examine sameness, because it’s integral to every twinship and how its perceived.”
As both a twin myself and a journalist who has covered multiples in the past, Pogrebin’s words seemed spot on, an honest explanation of how multiples feel about the relationship into which they were born. It’s a balancing act between same and different that is both enviable and deplorable. Twins have the rare comfort of going through life with a constant partner. As one tells Pogrebin, “We’re all looking for that relationship that twins were born with. Everybody wants to be loved that much.” But at the same time there’s a competing desire to be recognized for one’s own accomplishments and merits rather than your duplicity. Being a twin means vacillating between these two poles, attempting to land at a comfortable place. In that sense, Pogrebin’s book is a larger exploration of identity: how we make ourselves unique in a world of millions and establish our singularity when so many of the people we know do the same job as us or come from the same background.
On the morning her book hit the shelves, we talked about the tension of growing up fused, the most interesting twins she met, and how the book has impacted her relationship with Robin.
Up until now, there’s really not much in the way of twin memoirs. What got you interested in writing a book about your experience growing up an identical twin?
I had never found anything on the shelf that accurately reflected what it’s like to grow up a twin. I think it’s an easy relationship to oversimplify. It’s become the stand-in metaphor for what we all search for, someone who understands you without saying a word, someone who is your perfect match and other half. I think a lot of that is true. What was missing were the adult twin voices to say, “This is what it feels like, this is why it’s emboldening, this is why you feel strengthened, but here are all these reasons why it can muddle your own sense of self.”
In talking to so many twins, what did you find out about what it means to be a twin, what that relationship means?
So much of what I discovered is hard to put into words. If you start saying, “We’re so close, we talk about everything,” peoples’ eyes roll over. A lot of twins’ relationships are irrational and ineffable. There’s a power to it, an obligation, a sense of being truly responsible. Without even really realizing it, Robin is one of the forces that keeps me afloat every day. Or there’s Greg Hoffman [who lost his identical twin brother on September 11]. So many people have said to him, “Get over it, you’re an adult, you have a family, you have other siblings, it’s time to move on.” But that will never happen for him because this was his identical twin brother.
What surprised you about twins in writing this book?
I think what was surprising was how the intimacy that can be so uplifting can also in a way be stunting. It can keep you from learning how to do friendship, make you lazy about other relationships and unpracticed. You’re so used to a partner and sidekick and a backup that you don’t develop those muscles sometimes. I think in a way, for Robin and me, the twinship ended up getting in the way of our friendships. I saw that for a number of twins, where you’re growing up alongside someone.
You include a number of really heartbreaking stories about twins, like the man who lost his twin on September 11, and the identical brothers who both lost children to Tay-Sachs. Why did you feel those were important to explore?
Twin loss kept coming up, almost hitting me in the face. This is so fundamental, when a twin loses a twin or when a parent loses one twin. You have people saying, “You have another living healthy baby, you’re lucky enough,” but they’ll always feel like they have twins. The Lords [Charlie and Tim, the brothers who both lost children to Tay-Sachs] always stayed in my mind. It was so unimaginable. But it was so clear talking to them that the twinship was not just integral to why it happened but also to surviving it.  It was such a distillation of when twins can hold each other up.
Who were the most interesting twins you talked to?
I think the Lords, partly because of the way they talk in the same room is so effortlessly in sync. They were so comfortable in their intimacy. They’re two men, again living very separate lives, but there’s something so unabashed and sweet about their love for each other and I envied that. And then Ronde and Tiki Barber, they’re almost a cartoonish version of twins. They to me are sort of the paradigm of what twinship should look like. I asked them if they argue. And they looked at me like, “Are you kidding, you guys argue?” You should hear Robin and I, of course we argue. It was something so stripped down, the way we all idealize twins.
Was it difficult to explore your own relationship to your twin sister, Robin, to admit that you want to see her more than she wants to see you?
I think it’s still difficult to this moment, now that the book is out. I called Robin early on, when I was steeped in research and panicking, and she said. “You need to start with yourself.” I felt like that was a tactical way of saying, “I give you my blessing.” But it’s still more exposing than I anticipated, and I think Robin has some discomfort with that. Robin has read every word of it, so it’s not that I’m ambushing her. On one level, this is a very clumsy way to write a letter to her I’ve never had courage to write, expressing things about our relationship I’ve never said.
Near the beginning of the book, you and your sister get a genetic test to confirm that you are monozygotic. You describe your eyes tearing up when you get the results, and they confirm that you came from one egg. Why was that so emotional for you?
There’s something about you being kind of invested in the phenomena. It confers something on you. This just happened, you and your brother happened. It confirms, yes this is special and it is still unique. I was tense about that genetic test. We weren’t sure we were monozygotic, and that would really be embarrassing to write an entire book and be wrong.
As twins become more common, do you think they’ll continue to mystify us?
It’s still mystifying in the sense that it’s bizarre. Even when I see twins, I take a second look. I confer a certain intimacy on them. The presumptions are still there. What I think is missing is a little bit of the novelty. Robin and I were shaped by that celebrity, where you were special before you opened your mouth. I think you take that away and you’re changing the landscape. So I do think that’s going to happen. We are saturated. At a certain point it’s like, “I’ve had it with litters of children.”

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Here's an excerpt of my interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program:

 

ROBERTS: You write that you're still struggling with this sort of fundamental oxymoron that what makes you unique and standout and special, is actually that you're not unique - that there's someone exactly like you.

Ms. POGREBIN: That's so well put and I think it's the conundrum people don't realize when they look at twins. There's an assumption that it's this idyllic relationship. And in many ways it is. I mean, you come into the world with someone and you're never alone, you're never, kind of, floating out there by yourself, making your way. You always have an ally. You always have a backup. You always have a support system. But you're also always compared to someone else, always measured against someone else. And if you're identical as Robin and I are, you're constantly confused with someone else.

NPR's Talk of the Nation

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Having a body is confusing enough, but what if someone else had the exact same one that you do? That’s the issue, more or less, that Abigail Pogrebin tackles in One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular (Doubleday, October). A former television producer and a daughter of Letty Cottin Pogrebin—not to mention the force behind Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk about Being Jewish—Pogrebin also happens to have an identical twin sister, a New York Times reporter. Gathering twins’ stories and memories, and studying up on the science behind their relationships, Pogrebin offers insights into a strange, familiar phenomenon.

Josh Lambert, Tablet 10-19-09

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[Click Here to go to Vanity Fair]

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Double Day Interview with me on One and the Same
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Page 6 of 9 pages « First  <  4 5 6 7 8 >  Last »

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One and the Same

My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to Be Singular

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