A rocky road to happily ever after

When Joel ben Izzy woke up in 1997 with a toe the size of a tomato, he never thought he’d get a book deal out of it. And even with his storyteller’s imagination, he never would’ve conceived of the twisted path connecting the first event to the second.

Ben Izzy, an internationally known storyteller, had gout in his toe, fairly easily cured. But his family doctor, an endocrinologist, noticed something during a follow-up appointment: There was a tumor in his thyroid gland, in his neck. When Ben Izzy woke up after surgery, the cancer was gone, but so was his voice.

“I hope it doesn’t affect your work,” the surgeon told him, not knowing that Ben Izzy was an award-winning storyteller. For 15 years his humorous and touching folk tales, interwoven with personal stories, had taken him from Berkeley to Tel Aviv to Tokyo.

Of course, Ben Izzy, 44, got his voice back -- and he’s performing this weekend at the Beverly Hills Library and the Jewish Community Library. His moving new book, “The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness” (Algonquin Books, 2003), recounts the 15 months he spent nearly mute.

He grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, part of what he calls “the descending middle class.” He dropped out of Stanford in 1979, flew to Paris, and worked as a street mime for a year. But shortly after he returned to the U.S., a car crash dislocated his hip and ended his dreams of miming -- he could no longer create its fluid movements.

Still lame, he moved to Santa Cruz, where a woman broke his heart, magazines rejected his stories and after five days of torrential rains, he was starting to feel like Job.

“As I was opening up this newspaper to catch the rain dripping through the ceiling, by candlelight I saw this article about the American Storytelling Resource Center. I thought, ‘This, I can do,’ ” he says by phone from his Berkeley home. “I got on my bike and rode through the rain, with one crutch -- so I was just pedaling with one leg -- mud splattering all over me.”

He started telling stories. He told them at Stanford, where he returned to complete his degree in English. Then he told them in places like Hong Kong, Jerusalem and Paris, and then he told them on five CDs. Then he told them to a woman he loved (now his wife), and then he told them to their two children. They all lived happily ev-

“It felt again like the bottom had fallen straight out from under me. The idea I had cancer -- that first sense of bottomlessness below me -- I quickly built a platform under. I thought, ‘Well, this is a good kind of cancer to have. It’s treatable.’ ”

But he felt betrayed when he lost his voice. He couldn’t speak above a scratchy whisper. His 2-year-old daughter didn’t know what her father sounded like; he tried to convince her that it was his voice on his storytelling CDs, but she just gave him a curious look, as if he were making a joke she didn’t understand.

“I believed that my voice would come back miraculously. Every time I opened my mouth, I expected it to be back,” Ben Izzy says. “Even though you might think any reasonable person would realize after two months, three months, four months -- I held onto it for a long, long time, thinking it would happen.”

In March 1998, after nine months of whispering, he finally stopped pretending his full voice would return. “I was able to appreciate what was around me. I very quickly went to thinking I had it all figured out. But there one more bottom to fall out from under me.” His mother was dying. On his way to see her, all he could think to do was to tell her jokes and stories, but of course he couldn’t. And that meant that he finally heard his mother’s stories. “We made a connection we never would have made,” he says.

That fall, he got a call about an experimental surgery that might be able to restore his voice. Surgeons would insert small pieces of plastic that would prop up his one paralyzed vocal cord. If it didn’t work, however, he could lose even the whisper he still had.

And yet, he says, he felt like his story -- the one about the mime who broke his leg who became a storyteller who lost his voice -- had taken on a life of its own. There was no way to go but forward.

Ben Izzy was awake during surgery. When the first plastic piece was inserted, he couldn’t whisper. With the second, he couldn’t even breathe. The third one restored his voice, exactly as it had sounded 15 months earlier.

“When you hear a story,” Ben Izzy says, “it’s wonderful to sense that you have no clue what will happen next, and yet also to sense that, in the end, something will work out right.”

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Joel ben Izzy performances

Saturday, 8 p.m.: Adult Storytelling Series, Beverly Hills Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 288-2211

Sunday, 12:30 p.m.: Jewish Community Library of

Los Angeles, 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Storytelling for families, kids age 5 and older.

Sunday, 3 p.m.: Beverly Hills Public Library Auditorium,

444 N. Rexford Drive, Beverly Hills. Storytelling for families, kids age 5 and older.

Feb. 25, 7 p.m.: Borders Books & Music, 1415 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica.

Feb. 26, 7 p.m.: ALOUD at the Los Angeles Central Library’s Mark Taper Auditorium, 630 W. 5th St., Los Angeles. Reservations: www.lapl.org/events or (213) 228-7025.