ESSAYS: Houdini: Art and Magic By Brooke Kamin Rapaport with Alan Brinkley, Hasia R
Diner, Gabriel de Guzman and Kenneth Silverman Yale University Press, 261pp. £25

The Jewish Museum of New York is presenting Houdini: Art and Magic, an exhibition honouring the world's greatest escapologist, until March 27th. Yale University Press, in collaboration with the museum, now publishes an elegant book of essays and pictures showing Houdini (1874-1926) as an exemplar of escape from the poverty and anti-Semitic bigotry suffered by 19th-century Jewish immigrants to the United States.

According to Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the curator of the exhibition and the book’s editor and principal contributor, Houdini was an internationally popular superhero in the 19th and 20th centuries who became a cultural icon, still inspiring writers and artists 136 years after his birth.

He was born in Hungary and named Erik Weisz, the son of a soapmaker who professed to be a rabbi, an apparently learned man without any record in Budapest of rabbinical credentials. When he took his family to the US he was handicapped by speaking only Hebrew and German with a Hungarian accent and found life difficult. He somehow managed to become the rabbi in a congregation of 15 Jewish families in Appleton, Wisconsin, but that appointment did not last long. They wanted a rabbi who could speak English.

His son, from early boyhood, had to help the family to subsist. Renamed Ehrich Weiss to seem slightly less foreign, he performed for a while at the age of nine as “Prince of the Air” on a circus trapeze. Most providentially, he also got a job as an apprentice to an Appleton locksmith. Young Ehrich was naturally so adept at picking locks that he was able to unlock the doors of local shops after closing time – just for fun. The family moved to Minneapolis, with its larger Jewish population, but no synagogue accepted Ehrich’s father as a rabbi, and he had no luck even when they moved to New York, where so many Jewish immigrants stayed.

Ehrich remained a devout Jew throughout his life. When he achieved success (by then legally named Harry Houdini in tribute to the celebrated French magician Jean Eugene Houdin) he was a founder of the Rabbis’ Sons Theatrical Benevolent Association, organised, he said, in his father’s honour. Rabbis’ sons in show business, in which upward mobility was more easily accessible than in the hierarchical commercial business community of the US, included the association’s vice president, Al Jolson, and its secretary, Irving Berlin.

The exhibition and the book concentrate on Houdini’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune as a genius of escapology. Houdini justly boasted that nothing could confine him. Again and again, in public demonstrations alfresco, with thousands of spectators, and in theatres on both sides of the Atlantic, he proved that he could escape from handcuffs, chains and straitjackets, even a horrible contraption he called the Water Torture Cell – The Greatest Sensational Mystery Ever Attempted in This or Any Other Age. This was a glass-panelled tall box, filled with water, into which he was lowered head-first, padlocked, and from which he had to escape within three minutes or drown. It is believed he was able to swallow skeleton keys and regurgitate them when needed, but nobody seems to have explained how he once caused a two-ton elephant to disappear.

At the age of 20 he married Bess, an 18-year-old German Catholic, who helped him at first onstage and ever afterwards as a devoted wife. Although he was sceptical of spiritualism and campaigned against bogus practitioners, he cherished a hope for the possibility of communication with the dead. At his request his widow kept trying for 10 years on anniversaries of his death to receive messages from him, in vain.

For anyone who is interested in Houdini’s phenomenal career but is unable to get to the Jewish Museum in time, the book is a wonderful substitute memorial, profusely illustrated with photographs of the underdogs’ stocky hero, only 5ft 6in in height but formidably muscular, with the glaring eyes of a hypnotist. There are colourful reproductions of posters and playbills, always with his name on top, and photographs of Houdini and the paraphernalia of his grim, triumphantly liberationist vocation.

Patrick Skene Catling is the author of children’s books and novels