Who do you know who harry houdini is?
Harry Houdini was the master of illusion. His death-defying feats mesmerized an adoring early twentieth century audience who had never seen anything like him before. The son of a Hungarian rabbi, even as a child he honed every skill and grabbed every opportunity. So inspired by the life of French magician Houdin, Erich Weiss took his name, adding an “i” at the end to make it his own. He was a man who personified the American dream of the power of the individual to rise to the level of his own aspirations, no matter how wild or extraordinary they might be. His unspoken message to all of his fans was that man is limited only by the boundaries of his own imagination.
Early Life Throughout his life, Harry Houdini claimed that he was born April 6, 1874 in Appleton, Wisconsin. In fact, he was born with the name Ehrich Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary. His father was Mayer Samuel Weisz, a religious teacher, whose first wife had died in childbirth. Ehrich was a child of his second wife, Cecilia Steiner. How many children the couple had is unclear, although six of their children survived to adulthood. Hoping for a better life for his family, Mayer emigrated to America and changed the spelling of his last name to Weiss. Through a friend, he gained a job serving as a rabbi to a small Jewish congregation in Appleton, with an annual salary of $750. His family is believed to have followed him to America in 1876, when Ehrich was a toddler. Stories of Ehrich performing magic and escape tricks while in Appleton have never been verified. His mother claimed that as a child he learned to open locked cabinets to get at pies and sweets she had baked, but
