The Book of Intimate Grammar (Hebrew: Sefer Hadikduk Hapnimi) was published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad in 1991 and translated into English by Betsy Rosenberg in 1994 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The novel follows Aron Kleinfeld from 1963 to 1967 — from age eleven to fourteen — in a working-class Jerusalem neighborhood.
Aron’s central predicament is physical: while his friends grow, develop, and enter adolescence, his body refuses to change. He remains small, pre-pubescent, childlike — trapped in a body that doesn’t match his increasingly complex consciousness. This arrested development becomes both personal tragedy and metaphor: Aron is a boy who cannot become what his community expects, cannot participate in the physical transformations that signal belonging.
The novel is set against the backdrop of Israeli national life in the 1960s: the optimism preceding the Six-Day War, the collective identity being forged through military culture and Zionist ideology, the pressure to conform to models of masculine strength and national purpose. Aron’s failure to grow is also a failure to become the kind of Israeli his society demands — muscular, confident, collectively oriented.
Grossman renders Aron’s inner life with extraordinary intensity: the boy’s observations about language, relationships, nature, and his own body are precise, original, and deeply felt. His consciousness is hyperactive even as his body remains static — and the novel’s power derives from this contradiction between the richness of interior experience and the poverty of physical presence.
Collecting The Book of Intimate Grammar
First edition English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1994): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First English edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20