The Street Where Abraham’s Dreams Lay

The other day, walking down Bar Giyora Street in central Tel Aviv, I found an Engineering Diploma from the University of São Paulo, handed to an Abraham Levin in the distant year of 1951. It was just lying there, half-torn, water-stained, and abandoned like a forgotten letter from a previous century. I later discovered that Abraham would have turned 100 just four days after I found it. I do not know who he was. I do not know what happened to his diploma. But I have not stopped thinking about him since. In a sense, I think I was meant to find it.

I imagine Abraham, a young man full of promise, stepping off a ship or plane from distant Brazil—maybe even earlier, from Europe, by way of São Paulo—arriving in Tel Aviv in the early 1950s. What did Tel Aviv look like to him then? It was not the gleaming tech city of today. It was dusty and hot, a jumble of Bauhaus buildings and citrus groves, filled with immigrants like him, jews from Morocco, Iraq, Poland, Romania, Brazil all thrown together by history and ideology, trying to build a new life out of the ashes of the old. The tastes and sounds had to be brutally different than South America. The only thing to help him pass the language and cultural barriers was this diploma he worked hard to get in a different continent with a different language.

Zionism then was not a slogan on a billboard or a political litmus test; it was the guiding star for people like Abraham. It meant starting over. It meant speaking a new language, living in a land he had never seen but had always believed in. It meant hope, survival, and sometimes delusion. It was belief in something larger than himself, even when that belief was difficult or messy or inconvenient. It was a kind of faith, and like all faiths, it demanded sacrifice. Abraham was an engineer—a man grounded in concrete realities and practical solutions—but, like any Zionist, a man of faith.

That diploma he brought with him from Brazil—it must have meant everything. Proof that he was someone. That he had studied, worked hard, learned the laws of physics and calculus, and planned to build things. It must have been all he had to start again. Maybe it sat in a drawer for decades, yellowing with time, growing brittle like the body that once carried it across oceans; probably it was placed framed, on a wall, with pride.

What is more heartbreaking is the thought that someone—his children or grandchildren— held on to it probably for decades. Through moves, through life, through the endless shrinking of space that time demands they must have looked at it at some point and said, “We can’t keep everything.” And they were right. We cannot.

It reminded me of my own diploma—my Master’s in Fine Arts from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in LA. I was so proud of it once. It was heavy, beautifully embossed, signed by deans and provosts. I had imagined hanging it in an office, using it to get meetings, as if it would open doors. It never did. But now it is in a drawer, too. Wrapped in plastic, waiting for a wall it will never hang on. I cannot bring myself to throw it away, but I also cannot say it matters much anymore. The work matters. The life built around it matters. The piece of paper—less so, more and more.

And yet, that piece of paper was once sacred. Not just mine, Abraham’s too. Sacred to a moment. Sacred to a dream. Now, tossed into a Tel Aviv Street, it is nothing but a relic. Someone else’s hope, fluttering under someone else’s footstep.

I spoke to a Brazilian friend about this later. I told him I thought he must have been a good guy. He said it was impossible to know his character; maybe he was a scoundrel. It was a good point. We all walk on two legs and see with two eyes and were scoundrels at one point or another—or at more points than others.

Abraham, I do not know what kind of man you were. Maybe you were kind; maybe you were brilliant; maybe you were difficult; maybe you were a scoundrel too, like the rest of us. But I held your diploma in my hand and thought: you were someone. You loved, you struggled, you believed in something. You built a life. That counts. That stays, even when the paper does not.