Diana and I go a long way back. We met 20 years ago, when we were both enrolled in the preparatory program for foreign students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a new immigrant from Romania, and I was a wide-eyed 17 year-old struggling to overcome a provincial girlhood. After five years at a high school for girls that aspired to be more English than the English, I'd become a sort of Jewish-WASP hybrid. And Diana, with her five languages and easy ability to talk about everything from literature and art to boys and music, seemed like a character out of a pre-war novel set in central Europe.
Even though she'd never heard a word of Hebrew before immigrating to Israel, Diana passed the language exemption exam within six months and was accepted to medical school (I came to Israel knowing how to read and write Hebrew, but didn't pass the exam). Eventually she became a prominent neurologist in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, I drifted back to Canada and ended up completing my degree in New York.
We lived on different continents for 15 years, but we always stayed close. I guess you could say we're soulmates. Our birthdays are six years and one day apart, we complete each other's sentences, understand each other instinctively, trust one another without question. Often we'd have dreams about each other that compelled us to call long distance on an irresistible conviction that "something was up." And something always was up - a love crisis, a family crisis, the death of a friend. It was the morning after one of those dreams that I called and discovered Diana was pregnant with twins. But I didn't meet them until eight years later, when I moved back to Israel.
It took me quite a while to learn how to tell them apart. Now I see how the differences in their character are reflected in their body language. Lynn is a bit shy, and Kim is more of an extrovert - as you can see in the photos below.
Lynn
Kim
Daddy and his girls
Diana, Kim and me (photo taken by Lynn)
