Jews, Magic and the Holocaust

Disclaimer: Unedited AI Transcript

Larry (00:07):

You are listening to specifically for Seniors, a podcast designed for a vibrant and diverse senior community. I'm your host, Dr. Larry Barsh. Join me in a lineup of experts as we discuss a wide variety of topics that will empower, inform, entertain, and inspire as we celebrate the richness and wisdom of this incredible stage of life.

Larry (00:40):

I am often asked how I find guests and topics for this podcast. Most of the time, there's a topic in the news that has special relevance to the safety or health of the older adult community. Sometimes it's a story of a special accomp accomplishment. Sometimes it's just for fun. My guest today, Richard Hatch, has a story that's different and one that hasn't been told until he told it to the New York Times, but it needs to be told in his own words right here on specifically for seniors. It's g. So good to meet you, Dick. I'm fascinated by this story. Welcome to the podcast.

Richard Hatch (01:27):

Thank you, Larry. I'm pleased to meet you as well, and to be on your podcast. Dick,

Larry (01:31):

You hold two graduate degrees in physics from Yale, but as you put it, you find it easier as a magician to violate the laws of nature <laugh> than to discover them. How'd you get interested in magic?

Richard Hatch (01:48):

Okay, let me first of all say to apparently violate or to apparently to violate if we don't wanna split that in definitive. So I'm not really violating any laws, but hopefully when it's done properly, it looks like that.

Larry (01:58):

Oh, you destroyed all my faith in magic

Richard Hatch (02:01):

<Laugh>. I'm sorry, <laugh>. I got interested as a kid two ways. The first way was through a book and, and my interest in books kind of as a lifelong thing, especially books on Magic. But I was about nine or 10 years old, and I was home sick from school, and my mother was going to go out and do some shopping at what we called then Five and Dimes. It was either a Ben Franklin store or a Woolworths. We were living in Ames, Iowa where my father was on the physics faculty at Iowa State University. And she offered to pick me up something while she was on her errands, if there was something I wanted. And I had seen a, a set of magnets at this store and really thought, oh, that would be fun to play with. So that was what I requested.

Richard Hatch (02:46):

Well, she couldn't find it. So as a, an alternative, she picked up a book on magic, which was the Great Merlin's Golden Book of Magic written by the Great Merlin, who was, which was a pen name for a very well known at the time, mystery writer. Clayton Rosson was his real name. He was editor, I think for many years of the Rie Queen Magazine and things like that. Friends with a lot of famous mystery writers, but he was also a very prominent amateur magician. And he had written a wonderful book for children on how to, how to do magic tricks. So using that book, I put together my first little show for family and friends. And the big feat at the end of the show was I apparently sawed my brother's arms off, which I proved by pulling his shirt off, even though he was wearing a, a sports jacket.

Richard Hatch (03:34):

And that kinda set the hook initially. But the other, the other major influence at that young age was my mother's father, my grandfather Clawson. He was a dentist in Salt Lake City, which is where both my parents were from. And he did a very few magic tricks. I wouldn't even call it a repertoire. They were more in the order of stunts. But his interest was, he was the youngest of 10 children and his oldest sibling, 20 years older, big gap between them had run away from home in his late teens and become a traveling showman and hypnotist in Latin America starting in Mexico and then down other places. He eventually managed a magician, which is a quite a dramatic story, but he died quite young. My grandfather was only 12, his brother was 32. And I think because he had so few visits home, the impression on my grandfather, he loomed large in my grandfather's imagination.

Richard Hatch (04:27):

And he encouraged my interest in magic because of his brother's involvement in it. And also at that early age in hypnosis, his brother was really more of a hypnotist. And my grandfather actually mastered hypnotism for medical use in his dental practice for people that had allergies to anesthetics that he might use. And so that was my, my earlier interest. Magic started, but I was more interested in hypnotism until about fifth grade when I hypnotized a kid, Brian Stuckey at recess, and stuck a pin through his anesthetized ear and was head to the principal's office. Brian said it didn't hurt him, and he had pierced ear after that. But that was the end of my hypnotism career, and I shifted to magic after that. And you

Larry (05:07):

Performed around the world and run of some famous people?

Richard Hatch (05:12):

A few. I have performed in quite a few countries based here in the US obviously. And so that's the bulk of my work. But about every other year I have a chance to go to, to Europe principally Germany 'cause I have lots of connections there. And performed for some well-known people performed at Eddie Murphy's New Year's Eve party many years ago. And there were, of course, a lot of his celebrity friends at that party which was fun performed once in Houston at a party where George HW Bush was the guest of honors. That was fun. And he actually had an amateur interest in magic. There was a magic store in Washington, Al's Magic shop no longer exists, but when he was first vice president and then president, he used to pick up tricks for his grandkids to, to do them, perform 'em himself. So we had that bond a little bit as well.

Larry (06:04):

Your wife is a classical violinist and you and she have performed together.

Richard Hatch (06:11):

Yes. So we met at Yale. I was in graduate school studying physics, and she arrived the same year, but in the School of Music, we lived in the same dormitory on the same floor, and we'd share cooking duties and stuff. And I actually started taking violin lessons from her which blossomed into eventually a romance and, and marriage and kids and all that. But she and I occasionally, we started this when we were still in Connecticut, a performance together with a pianist. And so it's a, partly a concert. There's portions where there's music without magic. It's partly a magic show. There are portions where there's magic without music, but particularly the audience participation portions that's hard to choreograph to the music. But I think the most interesting and unique parts are where the magic and music are happening simultaneously. You can think of it as the magic being choreographed to the music, and that's my favorite performance.

Richard Hatch (07:02):

But a lot of stars have to align. You have to have the right venue tuned piano three schedules a bigger budget, and it just doesn't happen that often. So my bread and butter for many years has been at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is strolling closeup magic, which is appropriate in a lot of circumstances where more formal performance would be awkward to insert. So it's like a cocktail reception. I'm not monopolizing the attention of the group. I'm going from small group to small group keeping things festive on the sideline, just as my wife might be in a string quartet that's there, not to give a concert, but to provide background music. I think of that kind of performance as, as background magic. It helps to create a festive atmosphere, gives people lots of fun things to talk about.

Larry (07:44):

You mentioned your fascination with Books on Magic. Do you wanna expound on that a little bit?

Richard Hatch (07:52):

Well, it's My interest in Magic started with that book that I mentioned, and I somehow became a, a collector at some point. You know, you start kind of just picking up one here and there. When I was in Germany for a, a junior high school year which was turned into an exchange program, but was really a family my, my family and I had lived there in the 1950s when I was just from three to six years old. My father was a civilian working for the Navy in Frankfurt. And you might say, what is the Navy doing in Frankfurt? Not, not many large bodies of water. There's a river, of course. He was working for naval intelligence, and he was part of a team that would interview scientists who had escaped from the east. And so we were living in Frankfurt, and my brother and I, my brother's two years older, and my brother Joe, we went to a German kindergarten.

Richard Hatch (08:41):

And my mother befriended a German woman, Ruth Etten Gruber, whose daughter was also going to that school kind of through a PTA type meeting. And they became fast friends and our whole family bonded. And years later, when we were on vacation in Europe I ended up staying behind with the Nan Groovers at their invitation to relearn the German I'd spoken as a, as a 5-year-old by going to the German high school. Subsequently, their son my German brother, if you will Hans Stan Gruber came and spent a year with us in Utah going to that high school. And in the next generation my daughter spent a year with his family, and then two of his kids spend a year each with Rosemary and my family in Texas. So it's gone into the next generation and we're happy to maintain that.

Richard Hatch (09:27):

But I got on, I, we were talking about magic books. So in Germany, I'd go into every store asking for magic books. My German wasn't very good. And I couldn't distinguish between two words. So the German most common word for magic is salba. And that sounds like sar with a Ts. At the beginning, it spelled with a Z. My ear couldn't distinguish that from Zba with an s with no t at the front in the sound phonetically. And so I would mistakenly go into stores asking if they had zba. And ZBA means clean. So I would go into stores asking if they had any clean books. Not knowing that I was, I thought I was asking for magic books. I think my worst I finally confronted it when I went into a store, which there were big Xs over the bookstore, which I didn't know what that meant, that it turned out to be kind of a, a porno bookstore. And I was asking for clean books, and they gave me some quizzical looks. But fortunately my German improved, as did my selection of reading material.

Larry (10:25):

So now you presented a challenge for me to present, pronounce this correctly, in your search for interesting books on magic, you came across a book entitled De Juden. And Sal, I

Richard Hatch (10:39):

Get that Sal was pretty good. I would, I would say den with a y sound for Jewish. So it's Jews in Magic. And yeah, so that interest in, in Magic Books persisted. I was a first year graduate student at Yale and went to their big library, the Sterling Library of fantastic resource. Millions of volumes at that time. This was probably in 1979 when I first got there, nothing was digitized. This was all pre-internet computers. Everything was in a card, huge card catalog. It's like looking at the end of late Raiders lost art and all the boxes. That's how the card catalogs were. And so I was looking for books on magic 'cause it was my, my passion, my hobby. And this title jumped out at me. But for prob, what turned out to be the wrong reasons, it was UD in Sal.

Richard Hatch (11:27):

And that means Jews in Magic would be one common way to translate it. And I'd never heard of it, but I looked in the card catalog at the date and place of publication. It was published in Berlin, Germany, in 1933. Now, I am not a historian, but I knew enough to know that Hitler had come to power in 1933. And I assumed given the date and place of publication, that this was an anti-Semitic track, talking about what scoundrels and con artists and just generally untrustworthy people these fellows were. And so I ignored it not being interested in, in reading Nazi propaganda. And that set me back a couple of years, because ultimately years later, when I had terminated my graduate studies in physics and started on a career path as a magician, one of my first projects was to translate a book from German into English that was about a 19th century magician.

Richard Hatch (12:16):

And he has a fun name to pr pronounce UA Johan Neer. He was Viennese, lived from 1806 to 1875. And to this day, is considered one of the great renovators of the art, especially in card magic, where he had lots of creations and innovations. But the book I translated was mostly about his non card work, which was not well known in English speaking world which is equally creative, a great genius of magic. Anyway, as a result of having translated and published that book, I kinda looked at that as my magic PhD since I terminated my physics PhD studies, didn't, didn't write a thesis. I came to the attention of the magic community. And one of the people who had helped me in that project was a collective, not just of magic and magic books, but also Judaica was Jewish himself.

Richard Hatch (13:04):

Raphael Ellenbogen, great, great friend he became, and he said, you know, if you're looking for another project, why don't you take a look at this volume? And it was the book that I'd ignored in the Yale Library, dude. And in that salba, and looking more closely at it became clear I was totally wrong. It was published by the author who was himself Jewish an amateur magician, but a scholar of magic. And he had done it to honor the great role that Jewish magicians had played in our art, because many of the iconic figures were of Jewish heritage. Everybody of course, knows about Houdini. And Houdini's father was a rabbi family originally came from Budapest to America where his father was hired to, to be a rabbi in, in Appleton, Wisconsin initially. But a lot of the great magicians from particularly the 19th and early 20th century were of Jewish heritage way outstripping their statistical numbers as a part of whatever population they were part of.

Richard Hatch (14:02):

And so he became interested in that. I was pointed out to him by his mentor, a great magician who was himself Jewish. And just in conversation, he happened to say, you know a lot of, a lot of your idols were Jewish themselves. And that sparked his interest, and he started researching it. He was very quickly in 1933, had to terminate his university studies at the University of Berlin. And so I think he took what, what might have been his thesis and turned it into a self-published book collection of biographies of great Jewish magicians

Larry (14:35):

Who was the author.

Richard Hatch (14:37):

So his name was Gta Damman, D-A-M-M-A-N-N. And only in the last couple of years have I found out things about him. I knew the basics of when he was born and, and when he passed away, and that he'd published this book and later two other books on, on magic, but not on Jewish ion specifically. And in digging into his background, I've been able to uncover lots about him. I actually tracked down two of his first cousins here in America, one of whom sadly, has since passed away. They were both in their nineties, but the surviving cousin I'm still in touch with he is in his mid nineties, 95, last April. And so got a lot of family background on him, but it turns out he was from a very wealthy banking, private banking family in Berlin. They had a, a large mansion in the fanciest section of Berlin, Al, which was sometimes known as a a neighborhood of villas or a neighborhood of professors because of all the high profile people that lived there, upscale people.

Richard Hatch (15:42):

And he was one of two brothers. His parents, his mother died in, at age 49 in 1936. So during the third ra, but died quite young. She died at home, but I don't have the details of what caused her death. Her husband, who was considerably older, he died a year later at age 65. Again, we don't know the cause of his death, but the three sons that survived them suffered horribly and eventually became victims of Holocaust. Their wonderful home was forced to be sold I'm sure for pennies on the dollar, as, as one would say because they were Jewish and couldn't have that kind of property anymore. They were living then amongst friends, and they were arrested in trying to convert what assets they still had into foreign currency with the hope of immigrating to what was then Palestine.

Richard Hatch (16:39):

That, of course, was against law, not to immigrate to Palestine, but to convert your currency on the black market. Pretty much at, by that time, by the time they decided to immigrate, if you were Jewish, you had to leave everything behind. And I think coming from a wealthy background, that was a difficult thing to do. Their cousins that survived, those families who were not from Berlin, they were from the mother's side, they left everything behind, but they weren't leaving as much. And so maybe it was not as difficult for them to let go. The younger brother died in a camp called Zen, the Cos he's buried with his parents in a large Jewish cemetery in Berlin vice a huge cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of souls are interred there. And the cause of death is given on his death certificate.

Richard Hatch (17:26):

He was at this work, it was a work camp, not a death camp, but according to Wikipedia which in this case I consider it reliable, the average life expectancy of someone at that work camp was just two months. And that's about how long he survived there. His cause of death was given as the flu, which is very possible but obviously the conditions were horrible. His oldest brother who was married by then was sent to Auschwitz, and neither he nor his wife survived. And the middle one, gta, who wrote this work that I've translated, he was originally he was doing forced labor in f Frankfurt, got a slave labor, which all unemployed Jews, and most Jews by then that stayed behind were unemployed because they simply weren't allowed to work. They were forced to do slave labor. In his case, the records indicate that he was working for the Siemens Corporation at their cable work company putting probably melted rubber on wires, probably not the most pleasant work.

Richard Hatch (18:26):

But in September of 1942, he, along with almost 800 other Jews, were transported from Berlin to the city of Riga. Now part of Latvia, I believe it's the capital. And according to the records, after traveling there in, in the cattle cars that one hears about they weren't sent to a concentration camp. In fact, they were shot executed upon arrival. So his body is probably part of a massive unmarked grave at the Bikiny forest outside of Riga now a, a World Heritage site memorial to the victims. It has an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 bodies interred there. So a horrible, horrible end to the family. And part of my motivation is to, to honor his memory for having done this work of scholarship and then had great risk to himself, published it. You know, some would say foolishly at the worst time and place possible.

Larry (19:27):

Getting a little personal, if you don't mind. You are not Jewish. How, I'm not, how, how did you become so interested in, in the Holocaust and Jewish victims?

Richard Hatch (19:39):

I kind of thought that German magic society which the, the magic community is kind of an insular thing because there's, there's, there's no one else we can talk to about what we love so much because of the secret aspect of it. If if someone who's not a magician finds out how a trick is done, they're inevitably disappointed to find out. It's not really magic. They wanted to think, you discovered a new principle of, of physics, of science to be able to violate it. And, and usually it's something as simple as a piece of black threatened some double-sided scotch tape <laugh>, but that's not what they wanted to hear. They thought that you were, they were gonna learn some magic words. So that's a problem with teaching students. I don't take students before the age of eight because they, they think the magic word or the magic wand is gonna do it for 'em.

Richard Hatch (20:24):

And don't realize there's a lot of hard work and ingenious thought that goes into creating the illusion that magic is happening anyway. So I was fascinated by the German magic community, having lived there, having grown up there, having had friends there. It was like, how could this horrible thing have happened not that long ago? And how would I have behaved if I'd been there? And I, I can't answer that. I, I suspect not being Jewish. I probably would've gone along with everybody else and, and done ultimately things that I could not today be proud of. Fortunately, I didn't grow up then and there. But it, it seemed to me that the magic community mirrored German community as a whole. There was a, a German magic organization, the magic circle of Germany, which when the Nazis came to power, became the only officially recognized magic club.

Richard Hatch (21:16):

If you wanted to perform as an amateur, you had to get, it was run on the furor principle. The president was a film producer at that time in amateur magician based in Berlin, but quite prominent in the film industry. So his boss was Joseph Gibel, the propaganda minister. And he ran the organization, reorganized it on the fur principle with him at the top. And if you were an amateur magician to get permission to perform, you had to go through him. He also was quite proud of the fact that, that he was able to get a, a, a federal German law passed that made it a crime to expose the secrets of magic. And that was publicized throughout the world. Most magicians were rah rahing it, 'cause we don't like our secrets to be exposed, but it's a clear violation of, of our principle of freedom of speech.

Richard Hatch (21:57):

We don't like it when someone tells the secrets, but they ought to be allowed to do it. Anyway so there were Nazi magicians and there were Jewish magicians. And in 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws they had to, everybody that was a member of that organization had to reapply and certify that they did not, that they had purely Arian heritage, that they had no Jewish grandparents. And the organization dropped at that point, from, I believe 1400 members down to less than 400. Now, that's not because a thousand Jewish members quit. There weren't that many that were Jewish. There were quite a few, and obviously they could no longer belong. But there were also others who felt, this is wrong. You know, this is something we do for fun. And there was one club that had local branches in, in Cologne.

Richard Hatch (22:42):

The organization decided rather than go along with that, we'll disband, we'll continue to meet privately and include our Jewish friends for as long as we can, and just not go along with, with what we're being told. So there aren't a lot of heroes. But to me, it was interesting that the magic society seemed to mirror the larger German society. And I don't see that so much today. As often, I won't know if my, my magic friends are Republicans or Democrat. Society is becoming more polarized now, so it's easier to spot certain traits and know whether where someone's coming from, but typically it doesn't interfere with our relationship. But in Germany, it was impossible not to pick sides. And so that's kind of, I came into it that way. And then, of course, when I found out about this book had started a project to translate it, and the more I found out about the author, the more fascinated I became. So that's where my, my interest really came from,

Larry (23:39):

Were the magicians who were mentioned in the book, primarily German magicians and practicing magic in Germany at the time.

Richard Hatch (23:51):

Many of them were, of course, because that was where he was based, the author and doing his research. But he had access to French and American literature and corresponded with people around the world. And so it's not exclusively about German magicians. There are a couple of prominent families, the most prominent families that, in fact were weren't German. There's a dynasty of magicians, the Herman family that started with the father, Samuel Herman who settled eventually in Paris. He was an itinerant conjure and settled in Paris. And he had a large offspring, his oldest son who used a state named K Pars. And sometimes Carl Herman became a magician, very prominent in Europe. And his, the youngest brother of that family, his youngest sibling, Alexander. And again, like my, my grandfather, it was probably about a 20 year difference between those brothers.

Richard Hatch (24:44):

His older brother kind of kidnapped him and took him as an assistant to St. Petersburg. And the younger brother got the bug Alexander and became the most prominent magician in North America, known simply as hair on the grate. They kind of, the brothers split the world between them with the older brother getting the old world, and Alexander getting the New World. And then their nephew a grandson of the same Samuel Herman that started the dynasty. He, Leon Herman, took over in America when his uncle passed away at an early age, just 52 in 1896. And Herman, that Herman, the Great in the US was so prominent that newspapers editorialized with his passing, that that magic itself had died, which of course wasn't true, but he was so highly regarded. And his, they, they created the iconic image that persists to this day of the magician with the kind of Van beard, the goatee they all favored that look and created that image.

Richard Hatch (25:38):

And of course, any magician seeing them and wanting to become like them got that, got that look as well. So it persists to some extent to this day. Another fascinating family from Holland. The Bamberg family. It went into ultimately seven generations of magicians. And two of them were very prominent at the time the book was published. Theo Bamberg was worldwide renowned at the time the book was published performing under a Chinese stage name. It was actually a Japanese name, but he changed his character at some time to be Chinese, but kept a name. It was stage name was Oto possibly taken from mixing up the letters of either Kyoto or, or Tokyo. So the story goes, there are other versions of it, but he was very successful with a, a silent act pretending to be Asian and doing wonderful original magic on music calls and here in the States in Vaudeville.

Richard Hatch (26:34):

And he's not mentioned in the book, although there's a whole page on that family, which mentions all the generations, but it skips him deliberately to not jeopardize his career which was active at the time that Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler came to power at the end of January and the beginning of January. He was OK Keto was performing at a theater in Hamburg. I don't have any evidence that he performed in Germany after Hitler came to power, but he certainly had very deliberate omission. And his son who used the stage name Fumanchu, became a very popular entertainer, mostly in Latin America, started a number of Mexican movies, which you can still find on YouTube, and is still an iconic figure in the art. So those are non-German ones that were very prominent. And two of them were contemporaneous with the publish of the book is still active as performers.

Richard Hatch (27:21):

So it's interesting that in that reading that page, it mentions the generations, and it goes with fifth generation, talks about Kim Papa Bamberg, and it says there were two more generations, the younger, which is David Bamberg, who performs in South America under the stage named Fumanchu. It's like, where's six? Where's number six? <Laugh>. There's at least one other performer that was very popular in Germany at the time, who was just not in the book at all. And we know that Damman knew about him. He wrote about him elsewhere. In fact, he contributed to a, a who's who, a Jewish who's who that ran into the seven volumes that was published in what was then Romania. And he included biographies of both OK Keto and this other performer on Arnold DeVeer in, in the who's who, that was not published in Germany.

Larry (28:06):

This is a fascinating part of the story that that's really never been told before.

Richard Hatch (28:13):

It's very little known. And I, I'm hoping that with the help of the New York Times now, that it'll come to a, a wider attention. And so we're looking for the, the, the translation, the straight Translation is done. Our ambition is to, and I'm gonna say our, I have two publishing partners who are major collectors of magic memorabilia. And the book itself, the original book is Text Only. And so it's not very pretty. I have a copy here. Here's, it was published under two names. Here was the original publication, which came out in August of 1933.

Richard Hatch (28:46):

That last word's kind of a mouthful of Port on to Word. And he changed it when he reprinted it in nine, in December, 1933 to the one that I discovered in the Yale Library without paying attention to it. De in Debt. Sal if you look at them very carefully, the minor detail, you can see that, that I know if this will get caught on camera, but the, the original is slightly wider and slightly taller than the subsequent one. And it's not really a new edition, although it says on the title page, second edition, it's really, he took the unsold copies of the first printing, trimmed them, put in a new title page in a new cover, and then tipped in an ERO sheet that says, everywhere it says T ser, that should be changed. At Sal, he didn't do it. He just put in the erota sheet.

Richard Hatch (29:29):

So it's not knowing how many copies he did or exactly what his motivation there was. But I'm not sure I've lost my train of thought of where I was going with that for a second. But I, I got fa so I got fascinated with that in, in about 1983 or four my book was published that led that my friend to say, Hey, now that you're done with that, why don't you do, it was published in 1985, the book about hoof sensor. And so that's probably when I started looking at this and got photocopies to work from. 'cause I didn't have an original copy of the book myself. And so there was a book published in 1990 a who's Who in Magic, that in the entry on about Gunter Damon, the author of this book it mentions that these two versions of the book and his two later books.

Richard Hatch (30:20):

And in talking about the SBA Ines, and it says, English translation by Richard Hatch, forthcoming, that was in 1990. So it's taken me longer. The, the gentleman that wrote it was, was murdered when he was only 32. So it's taken me longer than his lifetime to put the project together. And basically, COVID gave me the opening performances came to a halt, and I was looking for projects and I thought, now's the time to, to turn my attention back to that and, and finish it up. But my two publishing partners and I, our vision for the book is to make it visually interesting by adding posters and playbills and other interesting visual material. Ideally we'd love to have it be a coffee table type book. It's not clear whether that ambition would be realized, but it certainly needs to be annotated.

Richard Hatch (31:09):

And in fact, at the end, maybe I can find it while we're talking, put on camera. Yeah. this won't get picked up probably, but at the, at the very bottom of the author's introduction, right down here above my finger, you can see in English it says The Lives of the Jewish Conjures. And what he is saying there is, if this book finds favor we anticipate that an expanded edition will be published in English under the name the Lives of the Jewish Conjures. So that's our, our goal is to honor his memory by doing that. We have several publishers that are interested. We're looking for the right mix that we want to partner with someone who will agree with our vision for it. And, and we'd like it to be, ideally, we'd like it to not be restricted to the magic market.

Richard Hatch (31:54):

The magic community is very insular, and it'd be easy to get a good publisher who would do a nice job and get it to magicians, people interested in magic history. But I feel that the story is, is more important than that and should be more widely known. And ideally in my two partners agree with me. It'd be great to have it in every bookstore. You know, so a a young 12-year-old enthusiastic magician might get it as a Bar mitzvah present and get excited about his heritage, and then maybe he'll be the next great Jewish magician himself. It, it,

Larry (32:26):

It's interesting on a, on a Jewish historical basis as well, not just as magic,

Richard Hatch (32:36):

I think. So I think it is people that aren't particularly interested in magic per se, might be interested in the, the story of this subculture. That, and, and my, my late friend, max Maven who birth name was Phil Goldstein, a great Jewish magician himself, died about two years ago now. He was very interested in this topping and was intending to write a book about Jewish magicians that turned into a magazine article based on talks he gave on that. And he came up with five reasons why he thought people from the Jewish community that became magicians were so successful and, and why they succeeded in, in excess of, of other ethnic communities that also had magicians, but didn't pull anywhere the same weight statistically that the Jewish community did. It's not that different from, or other fields comedy particularly in our American comedy culture the film industry, there are lots of places where Jews have thrived because of their industry and abilities. And you know, that of course, I never believe some people having conspiracy theories about why that is. But I think the reasons they're fairly innocent, they, they do well for good reasons.

Larry (33:57):

So, one more question. Sure. Do I have the beard for a magician?

Richard Hatch (34:03):

It's pretty close. I would probably, probably darken it up a bit to make it more prominent, but yeah, I, I always see Frank Zappa, who I don't believe was Jewish, but he has that, that look that these, the Herman brothers, you'll find online images. Maybe you can post some of Alexander Herman and his brother, and you'll see that that's, that's the image that we, when we think of a magician with his goatee and his Van beard, those are the guys that started that. So you

Larry (34:29):

Don't want to share one secret, huh?

Richard Hatch (34:33):

I'll get in trouble with the union. They'll pick me out. I wish I could, I, my students, the first thing I make 'em do is sign the, so-called Magician's Oath, and it's just one sentence that says, I promise not to expose. And we talk about what that word means. I promise not to expose the secrets of magic. So not just the secrets they're learning that day at the lesson, but in general, the secrets, wherever they might find them out. And, and we spent about a half an hour talking about them. The short version is what we we're by not telling people how things are done. We're not protecting the secrets. We're protecting our audiences from the secrets, because most people really don't wanna know. They don't know that they won't want, wanna know until they find out what the secret is, and then they wish they hadn't been told. So it's to preserve their experience of, of wonder and magic, which once it's gone, it's hard to get back.

Larry (35:20):

I have an annoying habit of trying to figure out how it's done, but

Richard Hatch (35:24):

That's natural. That's na that's part of the fun. Some people don't like magic because it's frustrating, because they want to figure it out. They wanna know the secret. It's not like a puzzle where you can turn to the back of the book or the newspaper and, and find the answer. And so they somehow find that intellectually challenging. And that's unfortunate because part of, I love, I love to see things and not know how they're done and, and don't have a compelling need to know, in many cases, I, I love not knowing. And it's becomes harder and harder the more knowledgeable you become about magic and its methods. It becomes harder to experience that sense of wonder. So I, I will go long places to watch performers that I know can give me that and recharge my, my batteries. But it's a natural thing to want to understand something you're seeing, especially when it appears to violate your expectations. So extremely.

Larry (36:13):

There was one show that we saw Platform Tiger in A Cage changed with Magician <laugh>. Okay, fine. As they were moving the stairway away from the platform <laugh>, they had it turned the wrong way. And this, oh oh, there's the magician.

Richard Hatch (36:35):

<Laugh> Yik. Yeah. That was something we weren't supposed to see.

Larry (36:39):

Oh, one big mistake. Yeah. Dick, this has been fascinating. This has been fun. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh,

Richard Hatch (36:47):

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it as well.

Speaker 4 (36:54):

If you found this podcast interesting, fun, or helpful, tell your friends and family and click on the follow or subscribe button. We'll let you know when new episodes are available. You've been listening to specifically for Seniors. We'll talk more next time. Stay connected.