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Death of an escape artist By Alex Epstein Tags: Friday Magazine A tourist guide to esoteric museums around the world will undoubtedly contain information - alongside the museum of old shoes in Barcelona, the museum of old telephones in Budapest and the museum of cats in Amsterdam - about the small exhibition space tucked into a lane that intersects with Maximillianstrasse in Munich, called the Museum of the History of the "German Houdini." It contains a collection of posters (many of them framed and hanging on the walls) promoting appearances by the once well-known escape artist Yakov Pinsky. Pinsky was a cousin of my maternal great-grandfather. (Behind him, in the only photograph of him in our family album, is the date September 6, 1928. The man on the right is Yakov and on the left is my great-grandfather, Mikhail, who left Germany that year after being bitten by the bug of communism, but that is liable to turn into a different story within a story, like the photo album that great-granddad is holding in the photograph of the two ...). He appears to have adopted the stage name "The German Houdini" from the very outset of his career, in 1931. His last documented appearance before the war was at 8 P.M. on April 2, 1935, in a theater in Baden-Baden. (There he performed one of his famous escape tricks. He was tied in a straitjacket and placed in a cage with a gorilla. A cloth was draped over the cage and within less than a minute Yakov was free, sitting in the cage, legs crossed, holding a glass of cognac, the huge beast lying at his feet, tied in the straitjacket. Asked in an interview with a local Munich paper how he did it, he replied that the trick could also be performed with a minor reversal of roles - what counted, he said, was who was in the cage first.) He may also have performed a few times that year in Switzerland, after obtaining false papers and accompanying a traveling circus from Berlin. In 1938, at the age of 34, he was arrested and transported to Buchenwald. Five years later he was sent to Auschwitz. Miraculously - there was no other way - he survived both camps. Advertisement His movements in the first years after the war are hazy. He apparently sailed to Palestine, though it's unlikely he found an audience for his artistry there. Press clippings on display in the Munich museum show that he started performing again in his hometown in 1950. Locked in a steel container filled with water, arms and legs bound, he would burst out with blood on his lips, as though hinting to the cheering crowd that he had bitten through the metal handcuffs. Elsewhere - or perhaps only here - we find a description of one of the hors d'oeuvres in his performances. He would fold one of the advertising posters for the show lengthwise and widthwise, and then over and over, lengthwise and widthwise and again lengthwise, until he reached the edge of the paper: eight folds. But he somehow managed to fold the poster one more time. Then he would unfold it completely and show the audience that its entire text and all the photographs had been erased, as though the folds had turned it into a plain white sheet of paper. His health deteriorated after an accident he suffered in May 1959. He tripped on a street where excavation work was in progress and fell under a tram. As the end approaches, the artist's freedom intensifies. His lower body remained paralyzed, but he insisted, after two nightmarish months in hospital, on returning to the stage and performing complex escape stunts until his last days. The photographs on the posters for his final performances show him naked from the waist up, muscular and dark, while sitting in a wheelchair below his new stage name in gigantic font: "The Crippled Houdini." At midday on June 8, 1961, he fainted during a rehearsal and was hospitalized. He refused to accept a morphine shot, but he was injected with the drug anyway, at 8:15 P.M., after losing consciousness again. He died in the hospital that day shortly before midnight, from bleeding in the liver. Inscribed on his tombstone in the Jewish cemetery of Munich are, as he instructed in his last will, his original name, Yakov Pinsky, and the names of his parents, Hannah and Abraham. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Israel policy Obama camp dismisses Jesse Jackson's remarks on ridding the U.S. of 'Zionist control.' Welcome to AqsaTube The Palestinian militant group Hamas launches its own version of YouTube.

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