![]() But in 1882, Houdini’s father, Mayer Samuel Weisz, lost his job as rabbi for a Reform Jewish congregation in Appleton, Wis.plunging his family into poverty.Īfter the family moved to Milwaukee when Erik was 8 years old, the boy sold newspapers, shined shoes and delivered groceries to put food on the table. The Weisz family emigrated to America in 1878 when the future magician was 4 years old. ![]() “Our exhibit,” London said, “takes a peek behind the curtain.” ![]() In contrast, “Inescapable” devotes equal resources to documenting the hardscrabble first 26 years of the conjurer born Erik Weisz. London said that most exhibits focus on the headline-grabbing last half of Houdini’s life. It’s impossible to overstate the impact he’s had on magic.” “I’ve had a poster of Houdini hanging in my bedroom since I’ve been a teenager. “It almost seems as though my entire life had been leading up to this moment,” London said. Pinkert asked Jewish magician David London to put together the Houdini exhibit after attending his Artscape show last year. “Inescapable” may be the one museum exhibit in the Free State this year that’s curated by a guy who does a magic trick involving celebrity toenail clippings. We wanted the exhibit to be fun for kids but also to have enough content so that adults relatively knowledgeable about Houdini will still find something new.” “Instead of just telling stories about the magic Houdini performed, we wanted to give our visitors a chance to experience it themselves. “From the beginning, it was important for us to give people different ways into the exhibit,” museum executive director Marvin Pinkert said. But kids - and grownups, too, for that matter - will get a kick out of trying some of Houdini’s most famously mystifying ruses, from a simple card trick to an illusion in which the famous musician and the museum-goer appear to magically trade places. In the exhibit, the mechanism by which the faux Jennie is whisked out of sight is to modern eyes charmingly obvious. Granted, the pachyderm in question is both miniature and a toy, unlike the famous illusion that Houdini conducted in New York in 1918 with 10,000-pound Jennie in front of nearly 6,000 audience members.
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