It was the third time I was meeting my brother, and we still approached each other a bit awkwardly. Manfred’s British handshake pushed back against my American half-hug. We sparred over who would carry my suitcase as I stepped into his foyer for the first time. I took off my coat, started to look around, and stared in shock at the distinctive framed print on the wall. For a few seconds, my jet-lagged brain struggled with how the same Picasso print of Don Quixote that I enjoyed so much—which I had just seen on the wall in my apartment in Brooklyn—had made its way to my brother’s house 3,000 miles away.
I caught my breath as we took a few more steps into the living room. Manfred motioned me to a chair—one of a set of brown Danish-modern easy chairs. They were exactly the same chairs we had in our living room at home. There did not seem to be a rational explanation. My brother had never been to our apartment and I had never sent photos.
These remarkable coincidences got us talking more freely about our separation and upbringing, and with greater feeling. We spoke a lot that weekend about studies of twins who had been separated at birth. In case after case, they led remarkably similar lives and married spouses who looked alike—even in locations far apart—before reuniting.
But we were not twins, and we were not separated at birth. I was a year old and he was four and a half when our mother sent him on a Kindertransport from Vienna to England. The next time he and I were together was 20 years later.
I was born three weeks after the Nazis marched into Vienna in March 1938. They moved quickly to take over media companies and other organs of propaganda. They immediately grabbed control of my family’s movie business. My grandfather and his brothers, who owned the company, and my father, who worked at the company, were taken into custody. My father remained in jail as the others managed to get out. Three months later, my mother was informed that he was dead.
Struggling with a newborn and my brother Manfred—and in increasingly perilous circumstances for Jews—my mother made the agonizing decision to keep her older child safe by sending him to Manchester, England. A couple volunteered to look after him there. My mother hoped that we would somehow be able to follow, but the war broke out several months later, and that became impossible.
In February 1941, on the verge of being sent to a ghetto in German-occupied Poland, my mother received a visa that would let us travel to the United States. And who was the savior who enabled this by providing the financial guarantee that we would not be a burden to the US? My father had a much older sister who had immigrated to the US, married, raised a family, and then died. Her widower, a brother-in-law to my mother, lived in Brooklyn. According to a Jewish custom with biblical roots, though rarely practiced in modern times (marrying a widowed in-law to keep the family line together), he hoped that this sister-in-law might become his wife.
We arrived in New York in March 1941, a few weeks before my third birthday. Within the year, my mother and her brother-in-law married and, confusingly, my uncle became my stepfather. What to call him was not simple. The matter came to a head when I was about five.
As in every child’s neighborhood, there was a bully. Eddie was a couple of years older and a head taller. For the most part I was able to stay out of his way. But on this day, I found myself backed against a wall, convinced that my life was over. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said. “I just want to ask you something. Why do you call your father, ‘Uncle?’” When I could breathe again, I ran home and told my mother. From that day on, I called him Dad.
My stepfather was 23 years older than my mother and as different from her late husband as possible. He was a big, heavyset man. He was uneducated and had no interest in culture, in contrast to my birth father, who had been well-read and earned a PhD. In photos from my childhood, my mother and my stepfather don’t look mismatched. He appears vigorous and younger than his age, while my mother—not surprisingly—looks far older than her years. She had adapted from a life of privilege to a life just above subsistence level in a new country.
***
I always knew I had a brother. Some children have imaginary friends no one can see. I had a brother who lived across the ocean in England, whom I had never seen and did not talk about. I knew he was real because we exchanged letters and sent each other comic books. I recall early memories of my mother and my aunt—in hushed lowered voices—agonized over whether it would be possible to bring Manfred to live with us. I was ambivalent about all this. On the one hand, it would be fun to acquire a new older brother. On the other hand, I had a really good thing going as an only child with a doting mother.
I met Manfred when I was 21 and he came to see our mother after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Meeting for the first time during her final days was a difficult way to become acquainted. I was eager to see him again. A few months later, I flew to England for his wedding.
Manfred went to work for Exxon, which gave him many opportunities to visit their US offices, with side trips to New York. And I joined an international company that offered many opportunities to go to Europe, with stopovers in London. We found ourselves getting together a couple of times a year and joked that we saw each other more often than brothers who lived near each other. Although we have comically different accents and sometimes need an interpretation of our different versions of English, we have become remarkably close.
There were reminders of our having missed a childhood together. On one of Manfred’s trips we were visiting with relatives in the suburbs. We found ourselves alone in their basement playroom, staring at their ping-pong table. We looked at each other, shrugged, picked up the rackets and started to play. I quickly became so overwhelmed by the awareness that this was the first time I had ever competed with my brother that I couldn’t concentrate and lost the game.
As a refugee child, desperate to fit in and be “a real American,” I intuited that the quickest path was through playing ball in the street and rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I remain, in my advanced years, an obsessive sports fan. In cataloging traits we had in common, Manfred and I quickly marked this as one of the most obvious differences between us. I picture Manfred in his study, reading the great classics, while I am rushing through assigned pages with my ear to the ever-present ball game. In my memory, my stepfather comes in grumbling, “From this you will make a living?”
***
I recently said to Manfred, “I can’t believe you’ve had an entire life without sports. What about when you were a child in Manchester?” “Oh, yes,” he said, “when I was a child, I favored Man City over Man United.” “So what happened?” I asked. “I grew up!” he said.
I went to England for Manfred’s 90th birthday celebration in November 2024. During my toast, I asked, “What were the odds that two Jewish children born in Vienna in 1934 and 1938 would be raising glasses together at ages 86 and 90?”