When I was a kid I was obsessed with Harry Houdini. I had been an amateur magician from a young age, spent all my birthday money on buying magic tricks and constantly nagged my parents to take me to the local magic shop. I'd pore over catalogues of tricks until the pages were ragged, circling my next purchase. I went to the magic conventions, even took a course in sleight of hand. Eventually I graduated to performing at children's birthday parties. But not being very comfortable on stage in front of people, I wasn't a very good entertainer. Even when I lost interest in performing magic, my interest in Houdini never waned. I read every book I could find about him, eventually realizing that there was something about my fascination with Houdini that went beyond his persona as a magician and entertainer. The infamous Montreal connection to Houdini made me feel a certain closeness to him, namely, that it was while performing here that he received the blows to the abdomen that ruptured his appendix which led to the peritonitis that killed him in Detroit. The punches were delivered by a McGill University student. But there was something else that I think drew me to him, although as a kid I was not aware of it at the time. Houdini was a Jew, born Erich Weisz. And it donned on me that the greatest escape artist of all time, the man whose career and worldwide fame were defined by death-defying stunts, whose family had fled persecution in Hungary to America in the late 19th century, was perhaps subconsciously and metaphorically manifesting his identity as a Jew. Houdini died a decade before the Holocaust, but I could not help imagining if a Nazi concentration camp, the gas chambers, or the crematoria ovens, could have held the master of escape. And that was the inspiration for the following poem, and the accompanying pen and ink sketch, above. Yesterday I was listening to Kate Bush's hauntingly beautiful song Houdini from her album The Dreaming, and it brought me back to the mysteries of the man, and to my younger self.
HOUDINI
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Outside my window
the maple tree daily yields
yellow leaves gasping
from gallows limbs, pendant cloth stars
stitched in the light
of the long ago dead.
Knotted roots clamber nightly
like arms through frozen, snow-laced
soil straightjacketing the foundation of my house
and I dream myself Houdini, struggle, contort,
disjoint my supple Jewish frame in all directions:
He was the genius of the century.
Had he been alive to see Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek
would his lungs have breathed the Zyklon B
as if it were the purest Laurentian air?
Would the bullets of the Einsatzgruppen
have passed through him like a spirit?
Would he have metamorphosed from flesh
through the crematorium smokestack
back to flesh again?
Would the doctors have experimented on him
with poisons and torturous instruments
to disclose the secrets
of his death-defying talent?
In the morning I wake
knotted in twists of folded linen
like the vaudeville Jew whose artifice
could not save him from one lethal blow
administered like a student quota
at McGill
underhandedly.
