LOS ANGELES (AP) — If "The story of Jack and Oskar" was pitched as the script for a Hollywood movie, it's a good bet no one would believe it. 
 
 In this Nov. 25, 1979 photo, Jack Yufe, left, and his twin brother, Oskar, look on. Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar grew up in Nazi Germany... (Associated Press) 
 
 Separated sixth months after birth in 1933, Jack Yufe was raised as a Jew in his native Trinidad while his identical twin, Oskar Stohr, grew up in Nazi Germany, where he joined the Hitler Youth movement. 
 
 When the two met again at a German train station at age 21 they discovered they didn't particularly like each other. Not so much because they were different, but because they were so much alike. 
 
 Yufe, who died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, had arrived for that first meeting wearing a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. So had his brother. 
 
 "I said, 'Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'" Yufe, who was 82, recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. "He said to me, 'Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'" 
 
 As they got to know each other better they would learn they also walked with the same gait, had the same nervous habits, even liked to play the same practical jokes on people. 
 
 "They both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," recalled Nancy L. Segal, a professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton, who studied the brothers as part of a landmark study of twins conducted at the University of Minnesota. 
 
 "They both used to like to sneeze loudly in elevators, thinking that was funny," she continued. "If you sat across from them at a table and there was a vase with a rose or something, they would both shove it aside because they couldn't stand that." 
 
 They also shared the same hot temper and competitive drive, which led them to learn not to ever talk politics or religion, Yufe's son, Kenneth, said Wednesday. 
 
 "It was an interesting pair to watch, for sure," he added. 
 
 The two were separated when their parents split and their mother took Oskar to her native Germany while Jack stayed in Trinidad with their father. In his teens, Yufe moved to Israel where he served in the navy before moving to the United States and going into the retail business in San Diego. 
 
 "When he first started he was selling out of a van, and he'd see people who had no shoes or horrible shoes and he'd say, "Here's a pair of boots, give me a dollar a week, that sort of thing," the son recalled. "He'd give credit to people who never had credit before." 
 
 But if the buyer didn't pay that dollar a week, his son recalled with a laugh, he'd demand those boots back. 
 
 "He was very old school, but he really was a wonderful guy." 
 
 It was in San Diego that Yufe's first wife learned of the landmark Minnesota Twins Study and persuaded her husband and brother-in-law to take part. They and others showed remarkable similarities despite growing up apart from one another for decades. 
 
 "As psychologists, it made us really rethink our explanations for behavior," said Segal. 
 
 Yufe and Stohr, meanwhile, came to care deeply for one another, said the psychologist, who got to know both over the 20-year study and wrote about them in her books "Born Together — Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study" and "Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins." 
 
 When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, she said, Yufe was devastated but couldn't bring himself to attend the funeral because he looked so much like his brother that he feared it would disturb the family. 
 
 "They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship," she said. "They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot tempered and short tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them." 
 
 In addition to his wife, Ruth, and son, Kenneth, Yufe is survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory and stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. ||||| Separated soon after birth, Jack Yufe, left, was raised as a Jew in Trinidad while his sibling Oskar Stohr, right, grew up in Nazi Germany where he joined the Hitler Youth. (Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times via AP) 
 
 Jack Yufe grew up missing his other half, an identical twin brother from whom he had been separated at six months. 
 
 For years, they exchanged letters and photographs. Then, at age 21, they met at a German train station. The encounter was detailed in psychologist Nancy Segal’s book “Indivisible by Two: Lives of Extraordinary Twins.” 
 
 Yufe and his brother, Oskar Stohr, examined one another as if they were looking at alien specimens, though no likeness could have been more familiar to either of them. Their cultural differences were as immediately apparent as their physical similarities. Casting a wary eye at Yufe’s Israeli luggage tags, Stohr removed them and told his long-lost brother to tell others he was coming from America. 
 
 From this first uneasy exchange in 1954 grew a complex but enduring bond that would bring Yufe and Stohr to the center of discussions about nature and nurture. After all, the differences between the brothers’ upbringings were more extreme than those experienced by most twins separated by circumstance. 
 
 Yufe grew up Jewish in Trinidad and became an officer in the Israeli Navy. Stohr grew up Catholic in Nazi Germany and became an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. 
 
 Yufe died Monday of cancer in a San Diego hospital, the Associated Press reports. He was 82. 
 
 Stohr passed away in 1997, also of cancer. 
 
 The brothers’ unique relationship was a source of fascination for the researchers behind the landmark Minnesota twin study conducted from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Seeking to identify how environmental and genetic factors contributed to psychological traits, the study closely examined the behaviors of sets of twins who were separated early in their lives and raised by different families. 
 
 What made Yufe and Stohr an extraordinary case was not only the stark contrasts between the cultures in which they grew up — Nazism versus Judaism — but also the striking similarities in their habits and emotional temperaments. 
 
 In 1933, Yufe and Stohr were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Romanian Jewish father and a German Catholic mother. According to Segal, it’s not known whether the couple was ever married, and their relationship quickly soured “as a result of [the father’s] ‘roving eyes’ and excessive drinking.” 
 
 The twins’ mother returned to her native Germany with Stohr and an older daughter in tow, while Yufe remained in Trinidad as a British subject. Meanwhile, Stohr became a subject of the German Reich and a member of the Hitler Youth, a cause he took on with enthusiasm. 
 
 The Los Angeles Times reports that Stohr confessed years later to having dreamt of shooting his twin in an aerial dogfight. On the other hand, Yufe had a nightmare about killing his brother with a bayonet. 
 
 Their stark cultural, political and religious differences were what initially made them the stars of headlines such as “Twins: Nazi and Jew” and snapshots that featured the Jewish star printed above one brother and a swastika above the other. 
 
 “But that’s too simple,” Segal wrote of the pair. “That’s not how it was.” 
 
 Once Yufe and Stohr started discovering their shared idiosyncrasies, those seemed even more peculiar than what set them apart. 
 
 The first meeting — when Yufe visited Stohr, his mother and her side of the family in Germany — was awkward. Yufe recalled to Segal, “We saw each other as enemies, neither one of us would change. We looked at each other with suspicion.” Then, on a boat trip they took together on the Rhine River, Jack had hoped to have some private time with Stohr, “but he was so unfriendly, and he was not trying to hide it. He kept covering his eyes with his hand.” 
 
 After six days, they parted ways with just a cold handshake. They wouldn’t see each other for another 25 years. 
 
 It was the Minnesota twin study that ultimately brought them back together. Yufe told the Los Angeles Times in 1979, “I thought it perhaps would be a good idea…to meet in a neutral territory to hash out all this, all the hidden feelings.” 
 
 The revelations began when they met at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. As it so happens, both were wearing the same outfit: a white sports jacket, shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. 
 
 “I said, ‘Oskar, you are wearing the same shirt and same glasses. Why?'” Yufe recalled in a 1999 BBC documentary. “He said to me, ‘Why are you wearing the same thing that I am?'” 
 
 The similarities soon piled on, with startling specificity: both read books from back to front, sneezed loudly in elevators, wrapped rubber bands around their wrists, flushed toilets before and after using them and wore tight bathing suits. 
 
 Segal explains in “Indivisible by Two” that some of these peculiar commonalities could be explained by genetics. The toilet-flushing, for instance, likely had to do with the brothers’ sensitivity to germs. 
 
 In later years, their wives noticed that they walked, and even tripped, in a similar fashion. 
 
 Still, some differences persisted. They could never agree on Israel and Palestine, for instance, or who was responsible for World War II. Segal writes, “Oskar’s repeated reference to German soldiers as ‘we’ infuriated Jack.” 
 
 After a stint in the Israeli army, Yufe eventually settled in San Diego and became the owner of a retail store called “El Progresso.” Stohr stayed in Germany, working as a miner and electrical welder. 
 
 “They had an amazing, what I would call a love-hate relationship,” Yufe’s wife, Ruth, told the AP. “They were fascinated by one another, fascinated by their similarities, intrigued that the worst traits that they saw in themselves were mirrored in the other one. They were hot-tempered and short-tempered and impatient, demanding. But their families loved them.” 
 
 Yufe’s son, Kenneth, described his father to the AP as “very old school,” but a “wonderful guy.” 
 
 Yufe is also survived by daughters Anita Yufe, Hovi Reader and Debvra Gregory, as well as stepsons Renee and Enrique Vega. 
 
 More from Morning Mix 
 
 A course originally called ‘The Problem of Whiteness’ returns to Arizona State as racial tensions boil over on campuses 
 
 Meet Sarah Parcak, a high-tech Indiana Jones, who just won $1 million for tracking down antiquities looters 
 
 Dunkin’ Donuts just ‘destroyed’ Starbucks with this much more Christmas-y holiday cup ||||| This story was written by Jenna Russell, Jenn Abelson, Patricia Wen, Michael Rezendes, and David Filipov of the Globe Staff. 
 
 The two young brothers from Cambridge seemed to be on promising paths, one a scholarship student at college, the other fighting for a national title in amateur boxing. 
 
 And then, apparently with little warning, they veered violently off track, deep into the darkness, setting off deadly bombs, authorities are convinced, at one of Boston’s most iconic and joyful events. 
 
 To those who knew them, the apparent transformation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19 — ethnic Chechens, born in the former Soviet territory now known as Kyrgyzstan and transplanted to a working-class Inman Square neighborhood — seemed almost inconceivable. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 But as friends and neighbors pieced together recollections of the terrorism suspects and their family, a picture emerged of an older brother who seemed to grow increasingly religious and radical — and who may have drawn his more easygoing younger brother into a secret plot of violence and hatred. 
 
 Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here 
 
 “I used to warn Dzhokhar that Tamerlan was up to no good,” Zaur Tsarnaev, who identified himself as a 26-year-old cousin, said in a phone interview from Makhachkala, Russia, where the brothers briefly lived. “[Tamerlan] was always getting in trouble. He was never happy, never cheering, never smiling. He used to strike his girlfriend. . . . He was not a nice man.” 
 
 The older brother dropped out of college, was seemingly unemployed, and faced a domestic violence charge in 2009. The younger brother, Dzhokhar (pronounced Ja-HAR), seemed less troubled, people who knew him said, a friendly, relaxed teenager called “an angel” by his uncle and a party-loving “pothead” by some friends. But there were hints of something ominous underneath the surface: a message on Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed on Marathon Monday last year referred to a Koran verse often used by radical Muslim clerics and propagandists. 
 
 The two young men, seven years apart, shared a keen intelligence and willingness to work hard, according to interviews with dozens of people who knew them. But there were stark differences between Tamerlan, who came to America as a teenager, and Dzhokhar, who was 10 or 11 when the family immigrated to the United States, and by all accounts thrived in their new American home. Their father, a lawyer before he emigrated, worked as an auto mechanic in the United States, while their mother was a licensed cosmetologist. 
 
 Their older son, an accomplished amateur boxer described by some as arrogant or standoffish, aspired to be an engineer but dropped out of Bunker Hill Community College. His younger brother, a well-liked wrestling team captain and National Honor Society member in high school, is currently enrolled as a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, living in a dorm on campus and studying to be a marine biologist. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 “If someone were to ask me what this kid is like, I would say that he had a heart of gold,” said Larry Aaronson, who taught the younger suspect at the public Cambridge Rindge & Latin School. “He was as gracious as possible … This is all surreal to me.” 
 
 Family history 
 
 The Tsarnaev brothers were ethnic Chechens, born in the former Soviet Republic now called Kyrgyzstan. Whether they ever lived in war-torn Chechnya is unclear. Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, was described by family Friday as a former Russian amateur boxing champion. While the family was living in Kyrgyzstan, Anzor Tsarnayev said in an interview Friday by the Russian agency lifenews.ru, they had trouble with government authorities. 
 
 “In Kyrgyzstan we were oppressed,” the father said. “We wanted a quiet life. I was afraid for my kids and tried to save them.” 
 
 By 2001, the family had taken refuge in Makhachkala, the capital of the predominantly Muslim Russian region of Dagestan, which borders Chechnya. There, the brothers briefly attended grade school. Anzor’s sister Maret Tsarnaeva told reporters that she wrote the refugee petition in April 2002 for the father, mother and youngest son, Dzhokhar, to receive asylum in the United States. The three other children, Tamerlan and his sisters, Alina and Bella, joined the family later. 
 
 With the family reunited in the United States, they seemed to be on the path to fulfilling their American dreams. The brothers attended high school and college and seemed to be succeeding, family members said. 
 
 Advertisement 
 
 “Everything was perfect because Anzor is a very loving soft hearted father,” Maret said of her brother. 
 
 But Anzor Tsarnaev’s former boss at Webster Auto Body in Somerville saw a very different side of the man, describing him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever known.” 
 
 Joe Timko, a foreman at the repair shop where Anzor Tsarnaev worked several years ago, recalled seeing him changing a transmission in a car in front of his house in single digit temperatures and snow. Timko said he instilled that toughness in his sons, sometimes riding a bike to a boxing gym on Somerville Avenue, while Tamerlan ran alongside him, training. 
 
 Tamerlan, the eldest son, became an amateur boxer, emulating his father, who helped train him. Boxing as a heavyweight, he competed in the national Golden Gloves competition, said John Allan, owner of Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts in Allston, who remembered seeing him compete. 
 
 “He was the best boxer in Boston,” said Allan. “He smoked all of the professionals.” 
 
 “He was noticeable because he was very relaxed, very smooth.” said Douglas A. Yoffe, the coach at the Harvard Boxing Club, who has seen Tamerlan box about half a dozen times over the past decade. 
 
 Yoffe also said Tamerlan stood out because he kept his distance from others in the clubs and at the tournaments where he fought. 
 
 “I remember he had that blase attitude,” Yoffe added. “For a very young fighter he was almost disdainful. He was very confident.” 
 
 Profiled in the Lowell Sun in 2004, Tamerlan said he liked the USA. 
 
 “America has a lot of jobs. That’s something Russia doesn’t have,” he told the newspaper. “You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work.” 
 
 He later said, in a photo essay about his boxing exploits, that he hoped to be selected for the US Olympic team, and that he dreamed of becoming a naturalized citizen. But he also lamented his alienation, saying, “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.’’ 
 
 Tamerlan attended Bunker Hill Community College part-time for three semesters, from the fall of 2006 through the fall of 2008, according to a school spokeswoman. But he never graduated and appeared to focus on his boxing career and a Rhode Island woman he is said to have met outside an Allston gym where he trained. 
 
 Dzhokhar, meanwhile, was a gifted student who earned good grades in high school but liked to smoke marijuana with friends, said those who knew him. He volunteered with the Best Buddies program, which pairs volunteers with people who have disabilities, and wore a red bow tie and matching vest with his black tuxedo at his prom in the spring of 2011. 
 
 On September 11th, 2012, a year and a half after his high school graduation, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a naturalized US citizen, according to government officials, after passing a criminal background check, a US civics and English test, and completing an interview with a federal immigration officer. 
 
 At the naturalization ceremony at the TD Garden, he stood with more than 2,500 immigrants to take the oath of US citizenship, raising his right hand and promising to defend the Constitution and laws “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” 
 
 “I don’t want to dwell on the anniversary today, of 9/11,” Judge Douglas P. Woodlock, wearing black robes, told the cheering crowd of immigrants from 132 countries. “But it seems to me that one thing we can say is the resilience of the United States after that attack is the result of the many different cultures which have blended together to provide continued strength for this nation.” 
 
 By contrast, Tamerlan had a green card, but was not a citizen. His father said in a New York Times interview that the domestic violence charges against him might have thwarted Tamerlan’s attempt to gain United States citizenship. 
 
 Growing extremism 
 
 In recent years, as discord rippled through their family, both brothers displayed signs of growing extremism. 
 
 Maret Tsarnaev told reporters at a press conference on Friday in Toronto that her nephew Tamerlan recently went from praying no more than once a day to praying five times a day. A neighbor and family friend in Cambridge said Tamerlan became a devout Muslim within the past few years. 
 
 “He started talking about religion,” said the family friend, who asked not to be identified. “He grew a long beard.” 
 
 The friend said Tamerlan urged him to be more observant, asking, “Why don’t you become a better Muslim? Why don’t you pray, why don’t you do your Islamic duties?” 
 
 When the friend joked about the beard, he said, Tamerlan became upset, asking “Why are you making fun of my religion?” 
 
 A next-door neighbor on Norfolk Street in Cambridge said he too noticed a change in Tamerlan’s appearance about a year ago when he began wearing long white linen garments. The neighbor, who asked not to be identified, characterized it as a striking change for the once hip-looking, urban young man, but said it only lasted a month. 
 
 Online, it appears, Tamerlan toyed with extremism. A YouTube account created in Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name in August 2012 includes in one playlist a video dedicated to the prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, which is apparently embraced by Islamic extremists. 
 
 In another video, featured on a playlist entitled “terrorists,” a speaker holds an assault rifle and wears camouflage fatigues while flanked by armed men wearing masks. 
 
 “There will always be a group of people who will stick to the truth, fight for that truth,” the speaker says in Russian with an accent common to the Caucasus region that includes Chechnya. “And those who won’t support them will not win.” 
 
 The Globe could not confirm that the user was the same person as the bombing suspect who was killed in a shoot-out. 
 
 At the end of 2011, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev contacted Brian Glyn Williams, a history professor at UMass Dartmouth who teaches a course on the history of Chechnya, expressing an interest in learning more about Chechen history. 
 
 “He wanted to rediscover his roots and his identity,’’ said Williams. 
 
 Williams called Chechnya “probably the most dangerous heart of darkness in the world.’’ The Russians, he said, have fought the Chechens since the 1700s and killed about 200,000 people — one fifth of Chechnya’s population — from 1999 to 2001. 
 
 But Christopher Swift, who teaches national security studies at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and has studied the war in Chechnya for nearly 15 years, said it is unlikely that the Tsarnaev brothers were formally trained by Chechen Islamist militants, whose terrorist activities have always been focused on Russia. 
 
 “If there is any connection between these kids and the insurgency there, it will be the first time they have struck a target outside of Russia,” Swift said in an interview. 
 
 The brothers’ mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaev, said she never heard her sons talk about terrorism. She was quoted by CNN saying that one son got involved in religion about five years ago, but “he never told me he would be on the side of jihad,” she said. “How could this happen?” 
 
 Tamerlan’s turn to Islam came as the family seemed to be disintegrating, according to neighbors and court records. 
 
 A next-door neighbor on Norfolk Street, who declined to provide his name, said he would constantly hear yelling and police would often show up at the family’s apartment. Another neighbor also described “screaming and arguments.” 
 
 The parents divorced, and spent extended periods of time back in Russia. The suspects’ mother, Zubeidat, was arrested in June 2012 in Natick and charged with shoplifting after a Lord & Taylor employee accused her of cutting the sensor tags out of several dresses, valued at $1,952, and hiding them in her shopping bag. The police report described her as unemployed and divorced. 
 
 Yet the older brother had the beginnings of his own family. He was married to Katherine Russell, who grew up in North Kingstown, R.I. Russell began wearing Islamic clothing shortly after she started at Suffolk University, one neighbor said. Russell and Tsarnaev also had a child in the past few years, and the three of them were seen on and off at Russell’s parents’ home in Rhode Island. Her mother, Judith, Friday read a prepared statement from the home saying she was “sickened” by the knowledge of what Tsarnaev did. 
 
 “Our daughter has lost her husband today, the father of her child. We cannot begin to comprehend how this horrible tragedy occurred,” said the mother. “In the aftermath of the Patriots Day horror we know that we never really knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev.” 
 
 The family declined to answer questions when a Globe reporter came to the door. 
 
 Dzhokhar, who reportedly did well in high school, was failing many of his college classes, according to a university transcript reviewed by The New York Times. The transcript shows him receiving seven failing grades over two semesters in 2012 and 2013. Several UMass students recalled seeing him smoking or playing laptop video games in the common area of his hall. 
 
 About two years ago, the father, Anzor, returned to Dagestan and his former wife also returned to Russia sometime later, according to CNN, leaving the sons on their own. The parents went back and forth to the United States numerous times to visit their children, their aunt said, and another relative said the older brother, Tamerlan, also spent a lengthy period in Russia last year. 
 
 Cousin Zaur Tsarnaev said he most recently expressed his concerns about Tamerlan — the alleged bomber pictured in a dark hat in FBI videos released Thursday — to Dzhokhar when the younger brother visited last summer. He added that Dzhokhar went to mosque sometimes but he was “never an extremist.” 
 
 “Dzhokhar is a sweet boy, innocent. He was always smiling, friendly and happy,” Zaur Tsarnaev said. “I don’t know how he is involved in this.” 
 
 Tamerlan, by contrast, had seen his share of troubles. 
 
 Gym owner Allan said that Tamerlan had once introduced him to an American, Brendan Mess, whom Tamerlan described as his best friend. 
 
 Two years ago, Mess and two other men were brutally killed in a Waltham apartment where they were found by police with their throats slit and their bodies covered with marijuana. The murders remain unsolved. 
 
 Tsarnaev hadn’t been to Allan’s Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts center in years, instead going to another nearby boxing gym. 
 
 Until this month. 
 
 Allan, who is currently traveling in Thailand, said he got an e-mail within the past week saying Tsarnaev showed up at the gym acting rude and disrespectful, using other people’s equipment, walking on the mats with his shoes. 
 
 “It was a clear indication that something was up,” Allan said. “He was becoming a complete [expletive].” 
 
 In the photo essay about Tamerlan’s boxing, called “Will Box for Passport,” Tamerlan stops to answer a phone call while walking from his Mercedes to the martial arts center. He has a long wool scarf wrapped fashionably around his neck and gleaming white leather slip-on shoes and is carrying an Oceanfly dufflebag. 
 
 He said in the essay that he quit smoking and drinking because “God said no alcohol.” He worried that “there are no values anymore . . . people can’t control themselves.” 
 
 People who knew the suspects struggled Friday to reconcile the young men they thought they knew, who lived on Norfolk Street in Cambridge, with the acts of terrorism they are accused of committing. 
 
 Pamala Rolon, a senior at UMass Dartmouth and a resident assistant at the Pine Dale dorms on campus, said she knew Dzhokhar for the past year and finds it incredible that he could have played any role in the bombs at the Boston Marathon. 
 
 “He studied. He hung out with me and my friends,” she said in a telephone interview Friday. “I’m in shock.” 
 
 Rolon, 22, said the 300 or so students at the dorm were evacuated this morning by school authorities as the campus was shut down. 
 
 Rolon said when she returned from class Thursday afternoon, she and her friends watched the television news broadcast showing the images of the suspects, including one that she thought looked faintly like the student she knew on campus. 
 
 “We made a joke like – that could be Dzhokhar,” she said. “But then we thought it just couldn’t be him. Dzhokhar? Never.” 
 
 In fact, less than 48 hours after the bombings, police said, Dzhokar was back on campus at UMass, working out in the gym on Wednesday and sleeping at his dorm. “I’m a stress-free kind of guy,” he wrote on Twitter, as investigators furiously worked to track him down. 
 
 In another posting, the day after the bombs, Dzhokar left a cryptic message. 
 
 “There are people that know the truth but stay silent,” he wrote, “[and] there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority.” 
 
 Peter Payack, the assistant wrestling coach at Cambridge Rindge & Latin where Dzhokhar graduated, said the youth wrestled on the team for three years and was captain for two years and a Greater Boston League all-star. Though he graduated from Rindge & Latin, he came back to wrestle with the team in February, he said. 
 
 “He was a dedicated kid, and all the kids loved him,” Payack said. 
 
 “He wasn’t a loner, the complete opposite. . . . He seemed like one of the most well-adjusted kids on the team. 
 
 “Never in a million years did [we] expect anything like this,” Payack said. 
 
 Payack, who has run the Boston Marathon 24 times and often wears his blue-and-yellow Marathon jacket, said he was particularly saddened that Dzhokar would target the race. 
 
 “It was like a bomb going off in my heart this morning because he’s one of our wrestlers. I said ‘That guy looks like my guy.’ ” 
 
 The capture of Dzhokhar and the bloody shoot-out that resulted in his brother’s death has triggered questions about their origins. 
 
 The state news agency of Kyrgyzstan said the brothers are ethnic Chechens who lived in the Central Asian country until “roughly 2001,” when they moved to Dagestan, on the border of Chechnya in southern Russia. A spokesman for School No. 1 in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, told Russian news agencies that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a pupil in the first and second grade. 
 
 The Russian social media website VKontakte has a profile of a Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who identifies himself as a resident of Boston and a member of the class of 2011 at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School. 
 
 According to the profile, Tsarnaev is a member of the group “Everything About the Chechen Republic.” 
 
 The profile lists Dzhokhar’s languages as English, Russian, and Chechen, and lists him as a Muslim. The last post was made in 2012. 
 
 While the brothers are Chechens, the press secretary of Chechnya’s pro-Moscow government told the official Russian news agency Interfax that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev have no recent connection with Chechnya. 
 
 The US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, said US diplomats in the Central Asian nation were scrambling to learn more about the brothers’ roots. 
 
 “We are following this issue very closely,” said Christian Wright, the embassy’s public affairs officer. 
 
 Back in the US, speaking to reporters outside his Maryland home on Friday, the uncle of the two suspects lashed out at his nephews for the shame they brought upon their family and country and “on the entire Chechen identity.” 
 
 Then the uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, apologized to the victims. 
 
 “I’m ready to kneel in front of them, seeking their forgiveness,” he said. 
 
 Maria Sacchetti, Mark Arsenault, Brian Ballou, Maria Cramer, Lisa Kocian, Sean P. Murphy, Matt Carroll, Gideon Gil, Tracy Jan, Bob Hohler, Michael Kranish, Doug Most, Sarah Schweitzer, Noah Bierman, Jonathan Saltzman, Todd Wallack, Meghan E. Irons, Bryan Bender, Lisa Wangsness, and Michael Levenson of the Globe staff as well as correspondents Leanne Poirier, Todd Feathers and Haven Orecchio-Egresitz contributed. Arsenault can be reached at marsenault@globe.com
– A California man named Jack Yufe died this week at age 82, and his life story is so fascinating that the AP likens it to a Hollywood script nobody would believe; the Los Angeles Times draws a comparison to a "tabloid headline." The reason? Yufe was born in Trinidad along with an identical twin brother, but their parents split after 6 months. Yufe grew up as a Jew, even serving a stint in the Israeli navy. Brother Oskar Stohr, meanwhile, went to Germany with his Catholic mom and grew up as a Nazi, becoming a member of the Hitler Youth. They managed to stay in touch and met again at age 21. The weird part? Despite their incredibly different backgrounds, they were alike in nearly every way. They dressed the same (both showed up to their first meeting in a white sports jacket and wire-rimmed glasses), walked the same, wore the same mustache, and had the same temperament and quirks. They both liked to sneeze loudly to scare people as a joke, and "both used to wash their hands before and after going to the toilet," says Nancy Segal, a professor of psychology who studied the pair as part of a well-known study of separated twins at the University of Minnesota. The brothers' story eventually rose to "the center of discussions about nature and nurture," notes the Washington Post. Though the brothers didn't much like each other at first, that changed over the years. When Stohr died of cancer in 1997, a devastated Yufe didn't attend the funeral, however, notes AP. They looked so much alike he was afraid it would upset loved ones. (A survivor of the Nazi death camps' only mass escape also recently died.)