Dreaming impossible dreams?

What would you assume are the chances that a girl who grew up in a disadvantaged family in a very poor neighborhood would rise above her circumstances to achieve a professionally successful life?

What are the odds against this child when you also factor in lower-than-average school performance, dyslexia and very low self-esteem?

If you had encountered Liran Ben Ivgi as a child, growing up in a hardscrabble, low-income neighborhood in Bat Yam, you probably would not have expected her future to be filled with anything more than another long spin in the seemingly endless cycle of poverty.

Now 42, yesterday’s impoverished child is today’s highly successful architect and interior designer, head of her own company, designer and builder of unique European-style homes, and the author of a recently published book, Beitim M’Halev (Houses from the Heart).

As she tells us in the beginning of the book, “I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Bat Yam, where nobody cared about aesthetics. Everybody was too busy fighting their daily battles. All people thought about was how to survive. I always knew I was different, that I needed beauty in my life as much as my parents and neighbors needed money.”

As I begin speaking to Liran, I decide to clear up one point that has puzzled me while listening to numerous life histories of people from Bat Yam. I ask her what exactly is wrong with the place, and why it features so negatively in memory after memory, story after story. “Very poor people live there,” she tersely replies.

That point clarified, she tells me how she became who she is today. “I did an aptitude test in the seventh grade. It was designed to test and reveal different skills. This test was not given in every school in Israel. It’s usually in places where the population is at a lower social and economic level, needs more help. Until then, I thought I had no skills at all. I knew also that I was dyslexic.”

As it happened, her dyslexia was more or less self-diagnosed many years later. “But I knew then that I couldn’t read or write well, and that I was mixing up letters.” At that time and place, however, Ben Ivgi’s learning disabilities went unnoticed and untreated. “But the test showed that I was very smart in architecture.”

Upon graduation from high school, Ben Ivgi enrolled in the IDF’s Atuda program, which allows young people to study first and then serve in the army in a position appropriate to their newly acquired training. Not surprisingly, she studied architecture and interior design.

“I entered the army in the Home Front Command. My job was to check and review architectural plans for the mamad, the safe room that is supposed to be in every house and apartment in case of war.” She began her own architecture and design company immediately after leaving the army, doing “all kinds of architecture.”

Ben Ivgi’s “eureka moment,” however, began around 13 years ago when the friend of a client asked her to design and build a “Tuscan” house. “So I did it,” she says, “and I loved it.”

After a bit of travel across Europe to study various styles of rural house design and construction, she now specializes in small, rural European-style homes, often accompanied by lush gardens and swimming pools.

As one might imagine, all of this has come as something of a surprise to people who knew Liran Ben Ivgi as a child in Bat Yam, especially her parents. “My parents were not happy with my desire to study architecture,” she recalls. “They said it was a mistake, that I was choosing a difficult path and they did not support me. But I proved to them I could do this. I prove it every day.”

Asked whether she has any advice for young people whose skills and talents may not yet be apparent, she says, “Don’t be afraid to follow your dreams. Whatever you can dream can be achieved.”

“I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Bat Yam, where nobody cared about aesthetics. Everybody was too busy fighting their daily battles. All people thought about was how to survive."