Photos Yossi Percia

We’re sitting in a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf café on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, when Mark Einhorn rolls up the sleeves of his khaki jacket to reveal an abundance of colorful rubber bands on each wrist. He peels off a few of them, and makes them into interlocking loops.

“No way these can come apart, right?” he asks.

I don’t see how they could. They look completely enmeshed. A few flicks of his fingers, and they’re separated. He repeats the move, but I still can’t figure it out. Then he performs a few equally puzzling variations.

Mark Einhorn is 48 years old, but exudes a child’s irrepressible enthusiasm and delight in performing his tricks. For Einhorn, play is serious business — one that occupies many of his waking hours (and he doesn’t sleep much). Whatever the skill, whether it’s amateur magic, intricate artistic paper cuts, or designing award-winning games for Amazon’s Echo, he throws himself into it with boundless energy and passion, refusing to stop until he’s mastered it.

Time for a Change

Although Einhorn and his wife Tami live in Phoenix, where Mark works for MUFG (Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group) as Vice President of Application Security, they came into L.A. for a day to do a little shopping and meet with Mishpacha. The Einhorns are well matched: She’s a listener, smiley and warmly supportive, while he’s a talker, crackling with ideas and enthusiasm.

Mark and Tami met in Chicago as young adults, when both worked as counselors for NCSY. Mark grew up in Skokie, Illinois. He attended the Arie Crown Hebrew Day School as a child, and was a high school freshman at WITS Yeshiva in Milwaukee when his father, a programmer for a bank, passed away unexpectedly during a business trip while staying with Mark’s aunt in Petach Tikvah.

“He passed away on my great-aunt’s couch,” Mark says. “I flew to Eretz Yisrael for the kevurah and the entire shivah. I learned two things from the experience. One — and I know this point may be controversial to some — a young child should try to see the parent before he or she is buried, for closure, to know the parent is really gone (which I did). Two, try to sit at least part of the shivah in your own hometown, with your community.”

Advised by rabbis to stay close to his family, he enrolled in the Skokie yeshivah (Hebrew Theological College) for a year, and completed high school at the Ida Crown Jewish Academy. The loss of his father impelled him to remain in Chicago after high school. He got a job working as a night manager at the local JCC, and landed a position as a market reporter at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

“That was before electronic trading,” he says with a chuckle. “I worked the change board. There would be someone from commodities walking around with a walkie-talkie, and people would give hand signals to indicate they wanted to call in a trade. Those were entered into a green-screen computer.”

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 749)