LIBRARY NOTES
 
Houdini remains synonymous with Magic -- world-famous for impossible escapes from handcuffs, jails and straightjackets, not to mention underwater coffins, giant foot-balls, and beached whales. As his biographer, however, I wanted to know more about him than his near miracles.
I wanted to know about his childhood self, Ehrich Weiss, the four-year-old who emigrated here from Hungary. About his luckless father, Mayer Samuel, a learned rabbi reduced, in America, to selling rare theological works from his library to support his seven children. About his mother, Cecilia, on whose grave he worshipfully erected a pharaonic Exedra chiseled from more than a thousand tons of Vermont granite. Half-hoping to reach his mother beyond the grave, Houdini despised the armies of marginally criminal clairvoyants and mediums who promised to contact the spirits of departed loved ones, and relentlessly pursued and exposed them. Fancying himself an intellectual, he edited a magazine and authored a half dozen books. Enthusiastic for the automobile and other technological marvels of the early twentieth century, he created a corporation for developing movie film by a new aniline process, and piloted his own airplane, hauling along on tour a five-thousand-dollar Voisin biplane in huge crates.
Finding out about this Houdini-in-the-round meant not only teaching myself to escape locked mailbags (as I did), but also exploring archives from London to Las Vegas and trying to wrest the secrets of his life from magicians, psychics, a murderer, two CIA agents, and his descendants, most of whom wanted nothing to do with him. Not least, it meant a return to my old neighborhood. I grew up at 218 East 75th Street in Manhattan, directly across from #227 -- the tenement where young Ehrich Weiss lived with his immigrant family at the turn of the century.
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