The family waited 20 years to immigrate to the United States. Upon arriving in the U.S., Wahba was thrilled to find her brown skin color (unappreciated in Japan as "curombo" ("darky") a plus in Los Angeles. "Where did you get your tan?" replaced hostile taunts in postwar Japan. However it was a revelation to Wahba, who grew up in a multicultural community with a synagogue composed of Jews from all over the world, to realize that most American Jews at that time in the 1970s did not understand that a Jew could be of Middle Eastern/African heritage. Everything Jewish was defined by the Ashkenazi experience. The Eastern Jew did not exist except in the Torah.