This Month's Installment
As usual, the italicized parts are what I'm unsure about:Now Fritz came too, with Borowski, the inspector, from work. He had changed all of his clothes, was fresh and cheerful and very pleased when the brother suddenly sat next to them at the table. And with what pleasure! In the summer a big [Satte] with thick milk and the coarse farm bread. In the winter, a plate piled high with warm grits and afterwards, when it was possible, [Stippe] with bacon and gray peas, or, when it came up, [Schmandkartoffeln] with [Bratklops] and cream cheese or [Glumse], those were his favorite foods.
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Happily, he left them for all the magnificence that Hutemach had dished up for the uncle and Hans. Because he had become a little more of a cultured man and had a more delicate stomach that was not completely prepared for the heavy East Prussian cuisine. Only the sorrel soup with the melted egg in it or the plate with pure Königsberg [Fleck] did he not allow himself to take; lunch always had to offer one of the two if he was there.
In late autumn, he had come to Bärwalde on vacation even for a whole week. These were red-letter days, one like the other.
"Listen, Fritz," said Hans the very first evening, "to-morrow I have to go see the old pond-digger, and you have to go with. It's outrageous that you haven't made a visit to the old gentleman yet."
"We have no time to be making visits in the country, Hans. You're not allowed to put such high cultural demands on us. We are farmers and plow our clod. We don't worry about the people, their formalities and customs."
"But with his priest, one must make an exception," threw in the old Bärwald resident, "the Pronitten pastor has always been close to us. I myself, although I wouldn't like to make any demands on church matters, have gone into his sermons now and then. Just for his sake."
Grammatical Minutiae
I don't have much to say about this month's installment. There were a lot of food words that weren't in my dictionary, so I had to leave a lot in brackets. I could recognize Kartoffeln (potatoes) in "Schmandkartoffeln," but that wasn't very helpful.I couldn't find a good translation for "Kirchlichkeit" either. My dictionary has the adjective "kirchlich," which it translates as "church" and "ecclesiastical" among other similar words. It's obvious that it has something to do with church (I could tell that even before looking it up), but it's a noun, not an adjective. I translated it as "church matters." I don't think it's actually a plural in the original text, but the meaning is close enough.
