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Harry Houdini
built 675 days ago
Silverman stated flatly that Houdini never spoke about his past especially concerning his father, the often unemployed Rabbi Weiss. It took a paleographer to decipher the antique German language records that showed the Weiss family was often surviving on charity in Milwaukee, one of their earlier homes. The sparse and cryptic information on Houdini's father led Silverman to conclude that a published story, in which Harry claimed he sometimes helped his dad teach kids the Hebrew alphabet, was probably made up. When informed of the slant that most of the video bios take, that the elder Weiss was singularly shiftless, the biographer did admit that underemployment was suffered by many immigrant Jewish men of that period. In fact, one person who advanced this theory in a sociological context was Jacob Drachman, who presided over young Erich Weiss' bar mitzvah in a synagogue on 67th Street.
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Ehrich Weiss