Educational Media Reviews Online

This film is a fascinating account of two identical twins, separated by divorce early in life, who were raised in two separate countries and ideologies. Oskar & Jack Yufe were born in 1934 in Trinidad. Their father was Jewish, their mother Catholic. Due to the roving eye of their father, according to the video, their mother left Trinidad with Oskar soon after his birth and moved back to her native Switzerland (Oskar was taken because he was the more docile of the two). Jack stayed with his father in Trinidad.

The life of the two identical twins was completely opposite of each other. Oskar was raised by his very strict grandmother in Switzerland as a Catholic and a Nazi, while Jack was raised by his father in the Jewish faith and sent to Israel in its early formative stages after World War II. While the brothers met briefly in 1954 during Jack's honeymoon, the meeting was tense and unemotional due to the vast ideological and cultural differences between the two. The identical twins were brought back together in the 1970's by Professor Bouchard of the University of Minnesota, who was conducting studies on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different cultural environments. While the twins maintain steady communication with each other, they still have problems dealing with the ideological and ethnic circumstances that have defined their personalities.

This video was intensely interesting and enlightening. Not only did it highlight the extreme cultural and environmental conditions that each twin grew up in, but it portrayed how closely linked they were in their taste in clothes, since the first two meetings between the two had them wearing almost identical outfits even though they barely knew each other. This film is an excellent film for classes in sociology, psychology, genetics, and modern world history (especially World War II). What was also fascinating throughout the film was that Jack narrated his experiences in English, while Oskar narrated his in German with English subtitles. Highly Recommended.