He with his family boarded a transatlantic ship from Bremen. Six years Houdini’s senior, Beck arrived in the USA virtually the same way Erik Weiss did: he was a Hungarian teenager of Jewish descent. The groundbreaking moment was when he met Martin Beck, a theater owner, and a booking agent he decided to take on the task of filling the seats for young Houdini. Back then, he was known as “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air.”īut he was neither prince nor especially high (career-wise) when he became Houdini, nor was he successful in the first years of his acting. Finally, they came back to New York City, and this is where Weisz, or Weiss, as a nine-year-old, took a career as a trapeze artist. The Weisz family, headed by Erik’s father Sámuel with his wife and seven children, experienced severe poverty in America and have been in pursuit of happiness in a few regions of the country. Photo: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (bottom) Heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey mock-punching Houdini (held back by lightweight boxer Benny Leonard). Photo: Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images (top right) Houdini in handcuffs, 1918. Photo: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons (top center) Harry Houdini Strapped To A Locomotive Wheel ca.1910.
(Top left) Houdini and Jennie, the Vanishing Elephant performing at the Hippodrome, New York in 1918. He arrived in the USA as a four-year-old with his parents in a typical way for Central or Eastern European émigrés: aboard a transatlantic ship from Hamburg to New York City.
Weisz (also known in the American version as Ehrich Weiss) was already a somewhat experienced stunt performer, and it seems that he was driven by the motivation to learn this art.
His choice was to create one after his French colleague Jean-Eugèn Robert-Houdin, then an already dead performer and an important figure in the trade. Harry Houdini was born in the late 1880s in New York City when teenager Erik Weisz took on performing as a magician and had to find an artistic pseudonym. There is even a striking similarity to the one of another American Hungarian Jew, Robert Pulitzer, who turned American media mogul and the founder of a famous journalism prize. In many ways, his persona may be a convenient symbol of the fate of Central European émigrés. Houdini is among the most known people in the history of American entertainment.
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