In Don’t Call It Night, Oz concerns himself with the minute and ordinary business of daily life in Tel-Kedar, a small settlement in the Negev Desert. Through the intimacy of individual relationships and reactions to a tragic death, the story explores the limits and endless possibilities of love and tolerance and its effects on individual and community relationships. Published in Hebrew by Keter in 1994 as Al tagidi lailah.

Amos Oz.
Panther in the Basement. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. 1st Edition. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Signed by the author, 22 November 1999.
Acquired with the support of the Sylvia and George Laikin Fund of the Wisconsin Society for Jewish Learning.
Call Number: (SPL) PJ 5054 O9 Z46613 1997

Special Collections, Golda Meir Library

In this story, Oz revisits the Jerusalem of his childhood in the last days of the British Mandate in Palestine. The narrative centers on a twelve-year old boy named Proffy (short for Professor) who is torn between his dreams of heroic resistance against the British, his friendship with a British soldier, and his need to vindicate himself to is friends and family over this relationship with an enemy. Indoctrinated by his patriotic father and his zealous Bible teacher, Proffy becomes "an excited panther in the basement, seething with oaths and vows. . . ."