The Karaites of Cairo
The Lichaa (Elichaa) and Massouda families belonged to the Karaite community of Cairo, a small and ancient Jewish movement that follows the Bible without rabbinic law. Their surnames still carry where they came from: El Basri, from Basra; Demeshki, from Damascus; El Afrangui, "the European".
The earliest ancestor on this side is Youssef Elichaa, born in 1795. Olivia descends from him on at least four lines, because the families married among themselves: in 1920 Dr. Yaacoub Massouda married his first cousin Claire, and Claire's brother Alfred married Victorine Lichaa, the sister of Olivia's great-grandfather.
A poet in the family
Mourad Farag (1867–1956), a first cousin of Olivia's great-great-grandfather, was a Karaite lawyer, poet and linguist who wrote some thirty books in Arabic and Hebrew and served as legal adviser to the Khedive Abbas Hilmi.
The Pensione Roma
Olivia's great-grandfather Yaacoub (Jacob) Lichaa owned a boarding house, the Pensione Roma, on Soliman Pasha Street in the centre of Cairo. In 1923 he married Soltana Massouda; their only son, Abraham, was born the next year. Soltana died in 1941, when Abraham was sixteen.
Leaving Egypt
Aimee's brother, Dr. Benjamin Massouda, trained in medicine at Cairo University and took part in the Jewish underground. He fled Egypt in 1954. When Egypt cancelled his passport and demanded his return, Senator John F. Kennedy and the Canadian politician Paul Martin Sr. helped him settle in Windsor, Ontario.
Aimee's uncle, Dr. Alfred Massouda, had settled in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1963 Abraham and Aimee Lichaa followed. In Providence Abraham founded the Abraham Lichaa Company, a costume-jewellery firm, which he ran until 2001.
The Abrevayas of Brooklyn
Olivia's mother's father, Abraham Abrevaya, was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to Eli Abrevaya, from a Sephardic family of the Ottoman world, and May Benharris, who died when he was seven. May's family was very probably the Benharrosh family from Tangier, Morocco, though that link is not yet documented.
His sister Lulu, an artist, eloped to Massachusetts in 1942 after a three-week courtship, and held a proper Jewish wedding when their grandfather came to Rhode Island. Abraham followed her to Providence. His first wife, Charlotte Berkowitz, is Olivia's grandmother; we are still looking for her parents.
Providence
Both families put down roots in Providence, and several of Olivia's grandparents rest at Lincoln Park Cemetery in Warwick. In 2017 Olivia married Alon Nachmany in Providence.