Harry Houdini a boarding house on East 79th Street. He was joined by the rest of the family once Rabbi Weiss found permanent housing. As a child, Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public début as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself "Ehrich, the Prince of the Air". He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. When Weiss became a professional magician he began calling himself "Harry Houdini", after the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, after reading Robert-Houdin's autobiography in 1890. Weiss incorrectly believed that an "i" at the end of a name meant "like" in French. In
Jan Weiss Jan Weiss Jan Weiss (10 May 1892 – 7 March 1972) was a Czech author, best known for his surrealist novel "House of a Thousand Floors" (). Jan Weiss was born on 10 May 1892, at Valdštejnská 68 in the town of Jilemnice, the son of Josef Weiss (known locally as "Monarch") and Filoména Richter. His mother died in 1897 when he was five years old, and his father remarried a German woman and had another three children. As an adolescent, Weiss and his cousin were known as local troublemakers. In 1913, he finished his secondary education at a Gymnasium