The Book of Intimate Grammar     by David Grossman, Translated by Betsy Rosenberg Original title: Sefer hadikduk haprimi Original language: Hebrew Country: Israel   Published by Picador Pub. Date: October 4, 2002 Format: Paperback, 352 pages Dimensions: 0.98 x 8.56 x 6.30 in. ISBN: 0312420951 List Price: $14.00, £8.90 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.01 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Farrar Straus Giroux List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering Published by Farrar Straus Giroux List Price: £14.99 Not available for ordering Published by Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 1994 List Price: £6.99 Not available for ordering Published by Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 1994 List Price: £14.99 Not available for ordering

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This is a book about changing perspectives. It opens with its young protagonist, Aron Kleinfeld surveying his world from the balcony of the flat opposite his home, watching his parents taking their evening stroll and meeting their neighbours. Everything seems in control: he has his closest friends with him, Gideon and Zacky, and as usual they are embarked on a project of espionage and counter-espionage, with Aron as decision-maker supreme.

David Grossman builds this novel in a poignant and unconventional way: his hero grows and develops, but not in the classic Bildungsroman genre where a young man’s growing maturity and knowledge of the world lead him to accept and flourish in his environment. Exploring and trying to understand the realities around him Aron withdraws into his own ’intimate grammar’ which he creates for himself in that place ’under his heart’ where words that have been cleansed, purified and made dependable can be stored.

We meet Aron’s family: his sister Yocheved, a talented ballet dancer; his parents, archetypal caring Jewish parents, offering their children attention, affection, advice and food, to the point of smothering them; and Grandma Lilly, ailing, and apparently near to death. As the story progresses we experience through Aron’s eyes the claustrophobia building up around him and his frantic need to delineate a space and a vocabulary all his own, where he can exist in peace and safety, away from all the unpredictable forces of parenting, love, life-and-death and friendships.

Grossman writes here with great sensitivity and empathy about the early adolescent, as in other of his works. He reflects with moving intensity on the resources a young and highly sensitive youth will draw on to counteract the misery growing in his heart.

Literary comparisons can be made between The Book of Intimate Grammar and Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep [reviewed in this Guide]: both protagonists are young Jewish boys, living in an unpredictable and sometimes alien environment, David Shearl in 1920s New York, and Aron in a distinctly unromantic Jerusalem, presented without beauty or spiritual nuance. Both ponder the issues of language surrounding them, and both learn the same bar mitzvah portion, a reading from the Prophet Isaiah, that impacts on their sensitive minds with great significance.

The bar mitzvah itself is gloriously and sensitively described, with Aron confounding all his parents’ hopes. The Rabbi in the synagogue seems fierce and disappointed, whilst at the party that follows in their home, Aron wants to hide from the fairly grotesque array of family and friends, telling coarse jokes and promoting their own children at his expense. Aron again feels betrayed by those surrounding him.

Grossman, born in 1954 and one of the most significant writers living in Israel today, has written a masterful novel about the pain of adolescence. The reader becomes involved not only as observer, but as perhaps the only witness who can salvage the overwrought young protagonist from a world where everything and everyone seem to be colluding against him.

’Last year in English class they learned the present continuous. Aron was thrilled: I em go-eeng, I em sleep-eeng. You don’t have that eeng tense in Hebrew. Gideon didn’t understand why he was so excited. Well, Gideon was like that, dead set against anything non-Israeli, non-Zionist, especially anything English, because the British loused up our country under the mandate, and if we had one drop of pride we wouldn’t be learning their stupid language. Aron wanted to point out that the Hebrew language has just as many exceptions to the rule, but he held his tongue and reveled in "I em jum-peeng..." Jumping far. Far out in space, halfway to infinity, and soon he was utterly absorbed and utterly alone; jum-peeng; it was like being in a glass bubble, and someone watching from the outside might think Aron ees only jum-peeng, but inside the bubble, there was so much happening, every second lasted an hour, and the secrets of time were revealed to him and the others who experienced time the way he did, under a magnifying glass, and inside you feel private, intimate, and the people watching you, pressing their faces against the bubble, wonder what’s going on; they stand on the outside looking in, puzzled and sweaty and filthy, and again he asks himself what it will be like when his bar mitzvah comes around in a year and a half, will he start growing those stiff black hairs all over, his might be blond, though; what happens, does some mysterious force squeeze the hairs out through the epidermis, and does it hurt, and he vows that even when he’s big and hairy someday, with coarse skin like papa and other men have, he will always remember the boy he used to be, and engrave him deep in his memory, because otherwise certain things might vanish in the course of growing up, it’s hard to say what, there’s a quality that makes all adults seem similar, not in looks so much, or even in personality, it’s this thing they have in common that makes them belong, that makes them law-abiding citizens, and when Aron grows up to be like them, he will still whisper, at least once a day, I em go-eeng; I em play-eeng; I em Aron-eeng; and that way he will always remember the individual Aron beneath the generalities.’ p36-7