Panther in the Basement (Hebrew: Panter ba-Martef) was published by Keter in 1995. The novella is set in Jerusalem in the summer of 1947, during the last months of the British Mandate, and is narrated by Proffy — a twelve-year-old boy whose neighborhood is consumed by the struggle for independence. Proffy and his friends play at being underground fighters, mimicking the Irgun and Lehi militias, conducting “operations” against imaginary British targets in the vacant lots and alleyways of their neighborhood.
When Proffy encounters Sergeant Dunlop, an actual British soldier who is interested in Hebrew and the Bible, he is drawn into a friendship that his community considers treasonous. To talk to the enemy, to see him as a person rather than an occupier, to share language and curiosity across the barricades — this is, in the neighborhood’s judgment, collaboration. Proffy is branded a traitor, and the label sticks.
Oz’s autobiographical connection to the material is direct: he grew up in exactly this Jerusalem, in exactly this period, and the novella reads as a distilled version of the childhood sections of A Tale of Love and Darkness. But the novella’s compression gives it a sharpness that the longer memoir sometimes diffuses. The question — when does empathy with the other side become betrayal? — is the question Oz spent his entire career asking, and Panther in the Basement poses it through a child’s bewilderment at discovering that the moral categories adults insist upon do not correspond to the complexity of actual experience.
Collecting Panther in the Basement
First English edition (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1997): Translated by Nicholas de Lange.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15