Panther in the Basement

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The films mentioned in the text are fictional. Their titles, plots, and casts were invented by the author to conjure up the popular Hollywood films which were showing in Jerusalem in the late 1940s, and which he himself watched there as a child in the local cinema.

I have been called a traitor many times in my life. The first time was when I was twelve and a quarter and I lived in a neighborhood at the edge of Jerusalem. It was during the summer holidays, less than a year before the British left the country and the State of Israel was born out of the midst of war.

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." The word shafel, "low-down," raised a question that still interests me now, as I sit and write this story: Is it possible for a traitor not to be low-down? If not, why did Chita Reznik (I recognized his writing) bother to add the word "low-down"? And if it is, under what circumstances is treachery not low-down?

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