At one time, both father and son worked in the garment business. Houdini’s father, Samuel, the rabbi, lost his job in Appleton, and the family moved to New York, where Samuel worked various freelance jobs (Hebrew tutor, ritual circumciser, officiator at weddings and funerals). In America, the Weisses lived in poverty. The name Houdini was an homage to the great French magician, Jean-Eugène Houdin “Harry” came from Ehrich’s nickname, “Ehrie.”’ Eventually Erik changed the spelling of his name to Ehrich. Four years later, the family migrated to Appleton, Wis., where Houdini later claimed he was born. Harry Houdini was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874, the son of Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and his wife Cecilia. A wall-size photograph shows a crowd in Rochester, N.Y., watching Houdini jump off a building. Inspired by a visit to a mental hospital, Houdini devised a way to escape from a straight-jacked (there’s one on exhibit).
The show, which originated at New York’s Jewish Museum, includes a trunk and a super-sized milk can many pairs of handcuffs (at one time, Houdini apprenticed with a locksmith) and a replica of the “Water Torture Cell”-a glass-fronted, man-size box which would be filled with water and into which Houdini was lowered, head-first and handcuffed-and from which he would escape in seconds. He would have been pleased at the wonders revealed in the current exhibit. “May wonders never cease” was one of Houdini’s favorite closing lines at his shows.
That symbolism may be one reason why Houdini, who has been dead now for 85 years, is still remembered.īut more obviously, there were the “magic” tricks and, though we’re not shown how he performed them, visitors to San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum can ooh and aah at images and film clips of them, as well as at the devices that Houdini used to captivate his audiences. And perhaps metaphorically: from his status as an immigrant, from poverty, from obscurity. It was, of course, a time before television, before most people had gone to the movies, before most people even had radios.īut-” self-liberator”? Yes: he’d “liberated” himself from rivers he’d jumped into while handcuffed and shackled, out of padlocked trunks and milk cans…. Harry Houdini was indeed (and justly) world-famous, the most renowned magician of an era-the 1890s to the 1920s-when magicians were revered entertainers. “Houdini, the Justly World-Famous Self-Liberator!” shouted a poster for Winnipeg’s Orpheum Theatre in about 1915.
Images, film clips, and artifacts from the life of Harry HoudiniĬontemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco Photo courtesy of Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Librar y Studio image of Houdini in chains, circa 1905
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