Daniel Abelman's youth was spent wandering the southern reaches of the Dark Continent, absorbing a diversity of languages, cultures and experiences whilst visiting friends in the most incongruous of places; or just living off the land.

Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, his childhood - spent in a backyard swarming with grasshoppers and overrun with chickens - was interrupted when he was given a pair of black lace-up shoes and sent off to school. Years later, after miserably failing his matriculation exams, he was given a long pair of pants and sent out to seek his fortune in the big wide world.

Quickly learning how to evade ticket inspectors on trains, he was soon a mobile up-and-coming young man with a bright future. He has since seen-it-and-done-it, as can be attested to by his checkered curriculums vitae: snake-hunter; soldier; tightrope walker; magician; restaurant/bar manager; hypnotist and peeker into things people seldom or never see … or in some cases never imagined to exist.

Having won a stake in a card game, he flew to Europe. When he found the climate too cold, he made his way to the Levant where he now lives. Jerusalem, where he married a rabbi's daughter and is the proud father of four children, is now his permanent base.

ALLAKAZZAM!

COMING SOON Man, myth and magic in lightest Africa Wickedly humorous Daniel Abelman is our guide on a magical mystery tour of African and Jewish culture, apartheid, the holocaust, telepathy, police corruption, rigged boxing, exploding dogs and orthodontics ... while a lovable psychic conman tries to peddle a miraculously discovered manuscript to gullible publishers with $$$ in their eyes. The astute reader navigates a labyrinth of highways and cul-de-sacs from the African bush to Jerusalem, via Germany, solving riddle after riddle (never sure if he, too, is falling under the trickster's hypnotic spell), until he ultimately finds himself as though waking from a memorable dream. Abelman writes with an enchanted pen. He shatters the rules of the novelist's art by creating new and more ingenious ones of his own, pulling rabbits from hats where other authors don't even have hats. ALLAKAZZAM! is accompanied by three of Abelman's haunting short stories. The novel and its accompanying short tales are exquisitely illustrated by artist Catherine Edmunds.