GROWING UP, LOYAL TO SELF AND TO NATION

Author: By Helen Epstein

Date: SUNDAY, October 5, 1997

Page: C3

Section: Books

``I have been called a traitor many times in my life,'' begins this latest novel -- novella, really -- by a man who has been one of the leading Jewish proponents of Arab-Israeli rapprochement since the 1967 Six Day War. ``The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. . . . One morning these words appeared on the wall of our house, painted in thick black letters, just under the kitchen window: PROFI BOGED SHAFEL, `Proffy is a low-down traitor.' ''

It is the summer of 1947. Proffy is the narrator, the only son of European immigrant parents who has been inspired by an American film to dub himself ``a panther in the basement.'' The novel's style is autobiographical, and the language so simple that ``Panther in the Basement'' could be read by a child. In fact, it is an adult meditation on the meaning of treason, and the conflicting obligations of enmity and humanity, set in the last days of the British Mandate in Palestine but strongly resonant of the present.

Oz is masterful at conveying a sense of time and place. With a few short strokes, he establishes the human landscape of Proffy's world: his sarcastic, proofreader father ``dressed in khaki, like most men in our neighborhood in those days''; his dreamy, compassionate mother, who teaches in an institution for immigrant orphans; Mr. Zerubbabel Gihon, his misogynistic Bible teacher; Mr. Lazarus, the tailor from Berlin, who somehow survived the war in Europe and lives in the former laundry room on the roof.

Most important to Proffy are his friends: Chita Reznick, Ben Hur Tykocinski, and Ben Hur's older sister, Yardena, who earns a prominent place in the narrator's memory not only because she is the first girl he has ever seen undress but, perhaps more important, because she is the first to tell him, ``You'll always write.''

Fox-like Ben Hur Tykocinski, the narrator tells us, will grow up to become Benny Takin, owner of a chain of Israeli hotels. His slavish lieutenant, Chita Reznick, will become a water-heater repairman, and Proffy himself a writer. But their characters are already fixed at age 12, when the three play at driving the British out of Palestine. Ben Hur is their tight-lipped, unsentimental commander; Chita is his lackey; and Proffy is, as he puts it, ``the grey matter,'' figuring out the mistakes Rommel and Montgomery and Patton made during World War II and how they could do better fighting the British on their own terrain. That is the state of affairs when Proffy disregards the curfew one evening and is arrested by a British sergeant named Stephen Dunlop.

``Against the urgings of my conscience, against my principles, against my better judgment, I was suddenly quite taken by him,'' writes the narrator. Dunlop is the antithesis of an imagined enemy: pale, hesitant, self-conscious and uncomfortable in his role as colonizer, who addresses Proffy in flowery, Bible-learned Hebrew: ``Pray fear no evil. I am a stranger that loveth Israel.''

``Don't angry on me, please, sir,'' answers Proffy in his schoolbook English. ``We are enimies until you give us back our land.''

The relationship that develops between the small, shrewd Jewish boy and the Bible-loving, oafish British sergeant and how it leads to the word ``traitor'' to be painted on the wall of Proffy's home forms the core of this small, rewarding book. It is very much a boy's coming-of-age story, reminiscent of John Knowles's ``A Separate Peace'' or J. D. Salinger's ``The Catcher in the Rye,'' set not in the traditional Anglo-American prep school but in an occupied country. At age ``twelve and a quarter,'' Proffy tries to sort out his feelings and responsibilities toward his friends, his family, his people, his people's history, and the place of that history in the context of the world.

Unlike many coming-of-age novels, this one is imbued with the wryness of a man who has put in many days as a father as well as a son, a soldier as well as a peacemaker. Reader familiar with Oz's work will recognize characters, themes, and even whole phrases the writer has used before in other work. But rather than reading like a recycling, ``Panther in the Basement'' reads like a reconsideration, a sifting through the facts, an attempt to understand: What do we retain of our childhoods? What remains constant and what is subject to change? How do we measure ourselves against the role models our society holds out to us? What are the demands of loyalty? What constitutes treason? What constitutes a decent human being?

Like Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic and Elie Wiesel in the United States, Amos Oz is a man engaged in the life of the world as well as the life of literature. More than either of them, he has enemies in his own country: not only literary critics who attack the quality of his new writing but nonliterary critics who say he is betraying his country.

``Panther in the Basement'' is not one of Oz's major books. In some places, simplicity borders perilously on cliche. In others, Oz indulges himself in a way a less prominent writer would not. But this small book is well worth reading, particularly at this season, when Jews reflect on the morality of their actions and inactions of the previous year.