Avner Mandelman

Avner Mandelman (born 1947 in Tel Aviv) - an Israeli-Canadian author and businessman. He writes in English but his fiction is mostly set in Israel. He is best known for his award-winning literary thriller, The Debba, and its sequel, The Undertaker’s Daughter. He served in the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War before moving to Canada in 1973. He is a former hedge fund manager and founder of Giraffe Capital Corporation in Toronto. He has also published two short story collections and two investment guides, The Sleuth Investor and The Advanced Sleuth Investor..

The Debba (2010) follows David Starkman, a former elite Israeli special forces assassin who has renounced his citizenship to live in Toronto. His self-imposed exile is shattered when his father, Isser, a legendary Israeli war hero, is brutally murdered in Tel Aviv. David returns to Israel for the funeral and finds his father’s estate comes with a bizarre condition: to inherit his legacy, David must stage a play his father wrote, titled The Debba, within 45 days. As David attempts to produce the play, he is met with violent opposition from mysterious forces, including government authorities and radical protesters. He begins to suspect his father’s murder and the forbidden play are linked to secrets from the 1948 War. The story unfolds against the high-tension atmosphere of the 1977 Israeli elections, which marked a major political shift toward the Right. He is ably assisted by Amnon Amzaleg, a gritty, no-nonsense police detective. The investigation forces him to confront his own violent past and the “double soul” of Israel—a nation caught between its artistic ideals and the brutal necessities of survival. 

The novel explores how the actions of one generation haunt the next. Mandelman draws parallels to John le Carré, questioning the moral cost of “dirty jobs” like assassination that society relies on but refuses to acknowledge. The “Debba” itself—a mythical hyena from folklore—serves as a metaphor for the tangled, often violent relationship between Jews and Arabs whose lives are inseparably intertwined. [Google/AI]

Mandelman, Avner, (The Debba [pb, Other Press, 2010]) 978-1590513705

Mandelman, Avner, (The Undertaker’s Daughter: Tel Aviv Noir [hc, self-published, 2023] 978-1738804450 [pb, self-published, 2023] 978-1738804436 [This sequel to The Debba is set 4 years later, and serves as the second installment of Mandelman’s planned “Undertaker” trilogy. The main protagonist is the police detective, Amnon Amzaleg, who is hunting a dangerous, racist serial killer determined to “cleanse” Israel of dark-skinned Mizrahi (“Eastern”) Jews. When state agents temporarily sideline and neutralize Amzaleg, his fierce daughter, Zohara, takes over the investigation, plunging headfirst into a high-stakes, highly dangerous hunt. The third volume of the trilogy, Death of an Undertaker, is in the works. – Google/AI]