Beyond Empathy

Of the many uses to which we put twins, from plot devices to product mascots to literary symbols, the most problematic is the scientific twin study. Often considered a gold standard when investigating an aspect of the human condition, twins have been the subject of studies of autism, attention deficit hyperactive disorder and anxiety—to name only a few of the conditions starting with A. Sadly, investigators with more ambition than humanity have been known to treat twins abominably. A repugnant recent example is John Money, the fraudulent sexologist who attempted to reassign the gender of one of a pair of identical twin boys, resulting in the eventual suicide of both twins.

But in the annals of twin exploitation, Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician who spared twins from the Auschwitz crematorium in order to use them as nothing more than the contents of a Petri dish, will remain the most repulsive. Although nearly all of the 3,000 twins he experimented on perished, the few who did survive owe it to the fact that they started life as one of two embryos in a single womb. To be a twin is statistically rare and to emerge alive from Auschwitz even less likely—the average length of stay there was 45 minutes. Thus, twin survivors seem to be particularly powerful embodiments of the randomness of fate and the possibility of heroic resilience as a response to it. This may be why two Canadian Jewish writers have chosen Mengele twins as the subject of their novels.

In Aryeh Lev Stollman’s 1997 novel, The Far Euphrates, an indiscreet adult tells a ten-year-old boy a secret about the adult Mengele twin he knows. Discovering that such degrading violence can be done by one person to another, while not being able to discuss it with anyone, leads to a severe flight from reality that permanently alters the boy’s development. The Far Euphrates is about the impact of being exposed to the task of learning about the evil of Auschwitz and the quandary of how to respond to it too early in life.

The Other Sister, by Lola Lemire Tostevin, looks at the same task when it is undertaken by someone who knows that it is almost too late. When Julia Brannon, a sharp-witted but physically declining nonagenarian, voluntarily gives up her autonomy to move into a high-toned retirement residence, she leaves behind her cloistered life in a WASP enclave (based on Toronto’s once-restricted Wychwood Park) and finds herself living with seniors from a variety of backgrounds, including one Jew who survived Auschwitz and another who endured the local anti-Semitism Julia did not realize existed in Toronto.

To satisfy a granddaughter who is as devoted as she is nosy, Julia keystrokes her life history in the form of a series of reveries on her laptop. Her memories revolve around being one of a pair of twins so identical that their own mother called them each by the same nickname they invented for themselves, “Sissa.” (Voluntarily blending identities is not an uncommon thing for twins to do. The psychoanalyst George Engel and his twin brother referred to themselves as “Oth.”) Julia’s reveries, interspersed between encounters with other residents of Evenholme, portray a life that has been balanced between privilege and tragedy. The wealth, beauty and intelligence of Julia and her twin, Jane, are not enough to protect them from their father’s descent into alcoholism after returning from the Great War minus one leg, or the rupture that breaches their joyful bond when they become rivals over the same suitor, or the unendurable loss of Jane’s own sons during the next war.

While trying to soothe Lena Kohn, a new Evenholme resident who has found the entry assessments unusually disturbing, Julia discovers that the woman too is a surviving twin. Forming a fast friendship, they discover over time that they have many twin experiences in common, including having reverse traits—in Julia’s case, she is right handed, while Jane had been left handed; in Lena’s case, her right eye is brown, her left eye is blue and her twin’s were reversed. But during these discussions Lena often confuses events that took place at Auschwitz with things going on at Evenholme.

“Did she measure your head?” Lena asks Julia about her entrance examination at Evenholme. “Uncle Pepi ordered Lili’s head shaved … Then he measured it. Hers and mine.” From these intermittent lapses Julia gradually learns about Lena and her twin sister’s treatment by Mengele. Clear as it is that these memories distress Lena, the well-bred, politely restrained Julia cannot stop herself from gently probing her. “[She asked] a crass and unnecessary question. Yet something about Lena urged Julia to cross a boundary … there existed beneath Lena’s fragility … a truth Julia could not fathom yet she wanted to move closer to.”

Lena’s fragmented narrative, punctuated by terror and bewilderment at the return of formerly forgotten memories, prompts Julia to review the same period in her sheltered though emotionally turbulent life. By correlating her memories with Lena’s, she experiences a terrifying clarity about events that had once seemed inconsequential to her. Historical events from her childhood link up with domestic happenings. These historical facts are masterfully woven into the story without seeming like extraneous research. As Julia recalls her father’s visitor, Frederick Charles Blair, expounding his reasons for barring entry to Jews from Hitler’s Europe, the reader recognizes that this is the Canadian minister responsible for immigration, whose policies were documented by Irving Abella and Harold Troper in None Is Too Many. Seeing Blair as a bombastic figure sitting in Julia’s comfortable home only intensifies the sense that perfidy can be around us without our knowing it.

Belatedly recognizing a disaster she had failed to perceive many decades earlier, Julia seeks to redress her ignorance as much as she can in her increasingly fragile physical state. She listens receptively and protectively to Lena’s lamentations, gently pointing out when she is “travelling” while encouraging her to elaborate her story. And despite her friends’ and family’s attempts to thwart her, she reads every book about Mengele and Auschwitz that she can get her hands on. Absorbing what she learns allows her to fulfil Lena’s exasperated injunction that “instead of … trying to erase my past [people] should try to imagine it.”

This compassionate listening is as beneficial to Julia as it is to Lena. Julia comes to recognize that there is something healing in accepting the hard facts of another person’s life and that she too is entitled to it. She relinquishes the burden of her own secrets concerning her deceased twin to another resident, liberating herself of a pretense she has maintained for more than 50 years. “As long as someone listened and remembered, a person’s life stabilized into clarity,” she concludes, feeling that she has achieved a sense of resolution that prepares her for the end she knows is coming soon.

As she succumbs to pneumonia, Julia’s neo-twinship with Lena culminates in a stunning imaginary merger of the two in Julia’s mind. “From childhood you move into memory, from memory you move into imagination,” Julia types on her laptop just before slipping into delirium. Lena’s horrific experiences become Julia’s own waning memories as she pictures arriving at Auschwitz, enduring Mengele’s intrusions, struggling to maintain a grasp on the slimmest sense of selfhood through childish strategies. Disturbing as these final images are, there is a redemptive and ennobling quality to one twin’s willingness to absorb another twin’s pain as her parting gesture on earth.

The character of Julia Brannon suggests that a kind of imaginative twinning that goes beyond empathy to the borders of psychic merger may be the most adequate way we have to fully respond to the victims of genocidal persecution.