PREISELBEEREN (Biographical)

    (Dedicated to `Niece' Nancy Doe)

A visit to my uncle's place is always a bit unreal. He married a girl from Latvia - that's a part of Russia now - and her mother, who lives with them, comes from there too. Naturally, they know a lot of languages. Well, my uncle really doesn't know any other languages, but he does know a lot of snatches of this and that. Even when they speak English, it's sort of different. As my aunt once said when my uncle put something in a particularly strange way, "Sush! The neighbors will say, `That lady next door, SHE is strange by way of tongue, and that husband of her's, HE is not much better.' " Kind of neat, don't you know.

Then there was the time when we came home from a German delicatessen - they are always going to strange food stores - with several bottles of different kinds of fruit juices among other things. One of these was called Preiselbeerensaft - that's German. So we all had a luncheon of the rolls and sausages, and they also had smoked eel - naturally, I drew the line at that - and some of the juices. So my uncle asked of no one in particular, "What do you suppose Preiselbeeren is called in English?" There followed a lot of discussion, but neither my aunt nor her mother could think of the American term. Finally, my uncle says, "Maybe it's red currant?" It did sort of look like red currants in the picture on the label. Well, his mother-in-law knew that wasn't right, but then she started groping for the German word for red currant. So after a while my uncle said, "Hmm, I guess that is Johannisbeeren." To which his mother-in-law replies, "Yes, of course, but, if you knew, why did you think that Preiselbeeren is red currant?" Then he says, "Well, I thought there might be several words for red currants grown in different areas." "Oh," his mother-in-law replied doubtfully.

My aunt then said that Preiselbeeren grew on a low bush, sort of like cranberries. "Oh, yes!" my uncle says. "I've heard that in Europe they have a cranberry, but it grows on land rather than in a swamp."  Now, you have to admit that is a different sort of conversation.