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Ibrahim Shihabi and I found each other at “People to People” the foreign students club in the San Fernando Valley. We became close friends. “Abe” sought me out, he heard I was a Jew from Japan. Did I know Florence, a Polish Russian Jew, the love of his life? Yes, of course, she was a year older than me, we grew up together in our small Jewish community in Kobe, Japan. Her father, a Holocaust survivor, was one of the lone Ashkenazi voices in our Sephardic Mizrahi dominant synagogue. I didn’t know why she was not returning for her second year until I met Abe. He was not only Syrian, he was Muslim. They were lovers. He was not what her parents expected her to find in the America we were all wa
