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WISE WORDS: Ben Izzy took a
cue from King Solomon.
Thad Russell |
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.
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