Once upon a time, there was a man who traveled the world telling stories for a living. It had taken him ages to find his calling, but at last he was happy. Then one day he woke up and his voice was gone.
This sounds like one of Joel ben Izzy’s fables. In fact, it’s his life story. In 1997, after 15 years as a professional storyteller, ben Izzy underwent surgery for papillary thyroid cancer. As the anesthesia wore off, he started to say, “Some adventure this is,” but no sound came out. Specialists said his right vocal cord was in shock; his voice might or might not return. Days went by, then months.
Ben Izzy (formerly Dickholtz, ’81) relives his 16 months of near-muteness in a memoir, The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness (Algonquin, 2003).
“I missed the ease of telling stories,” he says in a huge understatement during an interview at a small café. Plenty of times before, he had found himself without work, but another gig always came along. “I felt like I had the system rigged,” says ben Izzy. “I could turn anything into a story. If I was late to a performance, that was a story.”
This time, life seemed to have caught him. For a while, ben Izzy moped around his 100-year-old Berkeley house, where he lives with his wife, Taly, and children, Elijah and Michela, ages 11 and 8. Then his resourcefulness kicked in. If he couldn’t speak, he could write. In May 1998, the Washington Post published his essay, “A Narrator’s Nightmare.” An editor suggested he do a book.
That proved difficult—ben Izzy’s first draft was 2,500 pages. He told of his treatments, the trips to specialists, the brooding. “I wanted the reader to understand my misery,” he says. He’d write 60 pages, send it to his writing partner, physician Jeff Lee, ’81, for a critique, struggle some more, then mail it to his editor, who invariably said, ‘Try again.’
Ben Izzy says he sounded like a barking seal, yet one day he agreed to speak at a bar mitzvah, hoping that under pressure his voice would come back. “It was pathetic,” he says. But it was a turning point. He bumped into an old mentor, who insisted that losing his voice was the gift of a lifetime.
That angered ben Izzy, but he soon realized he’d felt sorry for himself long enough. His friend prodded him to find the point of his misfortune, reminding him, “Without a reason you don’t have a story—misery without meaning.” Was ben Izzy ready to learn from what he’d been through?
His editor echoed that message, saying he wanted something less literal and more magical. “When I heard ‘magic,’ I got it,” says ben Izzy. Magic meant the kinds of stories he typically told, like his current favorite, about how King Solomon lost his kingdom, then finally regained it once he had accepted the loss.
By weaving ancient stories from India, Jerusalem, Austria and elsewhere into his personal narrative, and applying their riddles and wisdom to his own life, ben Izzy transformed his experience into a story with universal appeal.
The storyteller admits to a weakness for schmaltzy endings. More than a year after he’d lost his voice, another specialist approached him. Ben Izzy underwent thyroplasty, whereby a piece of plastic was implanted to push his paralyzed vocal cord into position so it could vibrate against the other cord. Like King Solomon’s treasures, his voice was restored. With it came an understanding of the gifts of his ordeal—among them an appreciation of quiet and a heightened capacity for listening.
In one poignant scene in his book, ben Izzy, who had always regaled his mother with his stories, sits at her deathbed and listens to her. “It was one of the best parts of losing my voice,” he says. “To let her tell her story and see her shine.”
Ben Izzy doesn’t perform as much as he used to, preferring to move a bit slower and appreciate life. He also works as a consultant to clients such as Pixar Animation Studios.
“Do you remember the game Streets and Alleys?” he asks. “Ten people by ten people and one kid in the middle of the maze chasing another kid. The whistle blows and the formation changes from alleys to streets, and suddenly you are lost. Life is continually turning like that. Everything is great now, but the only thing I know for certain is that it will change again.”
That will be another story.
Nina Schuyler, ’86, is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
