Mirrors of Matajudíos

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My friend Liz has been living in Spain since she left New York two decades ago, and by now she’s acculturated herself to her new home: she speaks Spanish with ceceo, none of her boyfriends know English, and she is the treasurer of the regional traditional dance society. We’ve kept in touch over the years, our friendship a thin thread stretched across continents, maintained through sporadic emails, text messages, and the occasional video call.

When she first mentioned the man who looked like me, I almost dismissed it. Exactly like me? I write back. Exactly?

Your twin jajaja, Liz writes. I’ll show you next time I see him.

I’ve heard this before—that someone looks like me—but what does that mean, really? To look like someone. The idiom is unforgiving, distancing. It’s a trick of language, linguistic sleight of hand. Looking like someone is not being someone. Similarity is harmless; identity is terrifying. From some almighty perspective, we’re all the same. We are like clouds, trees, shadows, ponds. We can find images of ourselves in all these natural things, because to us we are everywhere and like everything.

Liz was persistent.

The next weekend Liz sent me a message with a photo attached. Here he is, Liz messaged, Look I told you.

I opened the attachment. His hair was different, the slope of his pate not mine, the jawline and the position of his eyes relative to his nose: all subtly off. If you squinted, if you suspended disbelief and had me in mind but didn’t know me well, you might mistake him for me. But not me. I knew my reflection too well—I hated it—and when I looked at him, I didn’t feel hate. He wasn’t me.

Close, I wrote back. But not quite.

But over the next few months, the man became an obsession, unravelling the story I told about myself. I was a freelance translator specializing in Sephardic historical documents, a job that allowed...