AT HOME WITH HOUDINI'S FAMILY IN BUDAPEST

In previous posts, we’ve started to clear up the historical confusion concerning Houdini’s father, M. Samuel Weisz. Was he a failure and ne’er-do-well? Or was he an ambitious intellectual whose hubris in Budapest brought him shame in America?

The waters have been muddied by biographers who portray Dr. Weisz as a poor, struggling rabbi, living in the ghetto and trying to eke out a living as a jack-of-all-trades.  

We showed in our last post that in fact he was a highly educated lawyer with a secure government job. In his only surviving picture he’s wearing a lawyer’s gown, with the traditional paraphernalia of a German Ph.D.: the four-cornered doctoral hat and book.  This corroborates Houdini’s own statements that his father had a Ph.D. and an L.L.D. and had attended German universities, including Heidelberg.  

We’ll pick up that thread again later.  First, we’re going to talk real estate.

Great thanks to Botond Kelle, a magician in Budapest who has provided us with these pictures of Houdini’s birthplace before and after its renovation in 2004.  He notes: “The things you wrote make sense to me because this house is in a quite good neighborhood (expensive real estate prices, at the city center). And as far as I know it was so at the time they lived here as well.”

After renovation in 2004

Historical portraits of Budapest confirm that this was prime real estate, right along the “ring,” near Octagon Square and abutting one of the city’s grand boulevards.  The city was undergoing an economic and building boom at the time Harry was born, and their building would have been close to brand-new.

Budapest street scene c. 1875

Contrary to various biographers’ uninformed guesses that the family was living in tenement-like ghetto squalor, much more likely was this description of a typical lawyer’s apartment in this neighborhood:

“They were not ramshackle buildings….  They were rectangular or quadrangular, built around an inner courtyard….  The stairways were often wastefully wide….  The best and largest apartments were usually on the first or second floors above ground level, with their doors opening from the stair landing.  …  The richer, more elegant apartments along the Danube, on the squares of the Inner City … had a minimum of four rooms, and sometimes seven or eight. Doctors, lawyers and important businessmen usually combined their apartment with their offices….   Well-trained chambermaids would lead clients to the family father’s receiving room during his appointed office hours, customarily in the afternoon.”  

                               -- (from Budapest 1900 by John Lukacs)

Interior of a wealthy Jew's apartment Budapest c. 1875

This contradicts most of the biographies, but tracks nicely with the family’s memories of life in the old country. 

Coming up:  350 Jews in Budapest are granted titles of nobility.  The wealthiest of these is named Weisz.

(Photo credits:  Google Images unless otherwise noted)