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
Peter Weiss Name of the Law, 1957), "Was machen wir jetzt?" (What Do We Do Now?, 1958). In 1959 he directed his only full length (experimental) film "Hägringen" "(The Disappeared"). In the early 1950s, Weiss had begun to write again, producing a number of prose works, some in German, others in Swedish. Most are short, intense, surrealist text which suggest the influence of Kafka (whose work Weiss would later adapt for the stage). The most important of these prose texts is "Der Schatten des Körpers des Kutschers" ("The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman", 1952). It is a nearly hermetic experimental