Herring salad on Myrtle Island: Martin Stelljes, born in 1903; Anna Stelljes, born in 1909

HERRING SALAD ON

Martin Stelljes

Born in 1903

Anna Stelljes

Born in 1909

“Well, I got here to America. I hope I don’t go hungry.”

Martin Stelljes never quite got over missing the chiming of the bells in Bremen, Germany, on Sunday mornings. Sixty years after he left his native country, he could remember the music filling the city as an important part of his life as the son of a Bremen watchmaker.

   With his fingers, Martin could touch the sad place in his heart because Adolf Hitler’s army had long ago melted the bells of Bremen to make ammunition. His emotional recollections sometimes overpowered him. One Christmas Eve, in their small jewelry shop on Drayton Street in Savannah, Georgia, during World War II, Martin and his wife, Anna, listened to a radio broadcast about Bremen. It was their home. Their family and friends were there. They had planned to return. Bremen was being carpet-bombed. Its churches, houses, markets and other landmarks were being flattened. Martin and Anna felt lumps in their throats. They felt like bursting into tears.

   As the radio told the terrible story, Anna stepped on Martin’s toe. The look in her eyes said, “Don’t say anything to disturb the holiday customers.” To the Savannahians who came in Christmas shopping, the couple gave smiles and Christmas greetings. Inside, they wept.

   Born in Bremen 1903, Martin grew up in his father’s jewelry store amid silver, gold, gems, watches and clocks, and at the age of fourteen, he became an apprentice watchmaker. Four years later, he passed the watchmaker’s examination to get his “papers.” That was a tough time, during the decade of World War I, to start a career in Germany. Grocery supplies were so scarce that for dinner they would have “potatoes and turnips one day, turnips and potatoes the next.” Martin pedaled his bicycle outside the barbed wire fence that encircled Bremen to call on farmers in the countryside, hoping to buy food from them. “We had money to buy with, but they had nothing to sell. You start making plans when you see you’re going to get hungry.”

   Although the American South was hardly prosperous in those days, Martin had an aunt in Savannah who wrote letters describing opportunity and inviting him to come to the United States to begin a new life. “Times were so black” in Germany, Martin said, his father sadly recommended that he go.

EMIGRATION BY FREIGHTER

So in 1923, Martin, age twenty-one, unable to speak a word of English, boarded the freighter Grete in Hamburg to cross the Atlantic Ocean to what was for him the unknown. Six decades later, he nearly wept when talking about that wrenching day of departure.

   “That night at about two o’clock, the captain woke me up to come out to see the full moon shining on the white cliffs of Dover. It was so beautiful,” he said, rubbing the tears from his eyes. That same captain, warned not to venture into the North Atlantic because of the icebergs and the chance of storms, chose the northern route anyway. He took the ten-thousand-ton ship, lopsided, through three days of high winds and seas so enormous the passengers could not see the crests of the waves. Barrels of tar spilled all over the deck. Oak logs were jettisoned and then broke the propeller blade. One man who fell overboard was rescued, but fear for their lives gripped all those on the ship.

   Once Martin’s feet hit solid ground again, he said to himself, “Well, I got here to America. I hope I don’t go hungry.” At first, he went to work for a Savannah jeweler, who sent him to a dark corner of the shop, paid him $7.50 per week and told him to get the broken clocks ticking again—without really repairing them. Disheartened and despondent, after five weeks, he quit and went looking for a job with another jeweler. Once he was hired again, he worked six years before returning to his homeland for a visit—and, as it turned out, for a wife.

   Martin met Anna on his first trip back to Bremen and—soon after taking her for a walk, and then for a bicycle ride—asked her to marry him and move to America. She was twenty-one years old. Once back in Savannah, they planned to stay only a few years, return to Germany and take over Martin’s father’s jewelry business. However, it was 1931, a year or more into the Great Depression. Unable to find a job, Martin put up $400 to start a jewelry shop of his own in a Savannah neighborhood where a Greek had a luncheonette, a Russian had a fur shop and an African had a laundry. Martin and Anna were not the only Savannahians with strange accents. They worked hard and worked long and hoped. World War II changed their minds about returning to Germany. For five decades, Stelljes Jewelers did its job of providing a living for the Stelljes family.

PICNIC ON THE

For Anna, especially, relaxation and fun in coastal waterways provided the most effective antidote to years of homesickness. In 1934, Martin and Anna, with their daughter Annelore, vacationed at All Joy Landing near Bluffton for the first time. There, on a sandy white beach, near the oyster-shell-and cement seawall, they picnicked and took photographs. For more than half a century, Martin remembered that joyous day. “We built a lean-to with palmetto fronds. Anna made a pot of stew. The children slid down the bluff. Then we started coming over every weekend to go shrimping, crabbing and swimming.”

   Other Savannah families also began spending summers and weekends on the May River. Eventually, Martin and Anna bought a lot on Myrtle Island and built a cottage, furnished with chairs from the old DeSoto Hotel in Savannah, and a table and cots from the U.S. Army. Martin got a rowboat, oars, a cast net, strings to hold chicken necks, a dip net for crabs and life jackets. Although the accommodations were rustic, the family felt they were in a place as beautiful as the French Riviera. More and more guests came. Warned by an old lady who said she had to sell her beach cottage after being “eaten out of house and home” by parasitic guests, Martin and Anna made a simple rule early on: Everybody who was congenial was welcome, but along with bathing suits and fishing rods, friends were expected to bring food when they came.

   Myrtle Island was their place of refuge from business and the place they came to try to forget what was happening in Germany. By the late 1930s, Hitler’s harangues and aggression, revealed in radio reports and newspapers, built almost unbearable anxiety in Martin’s heart. He recognized the troubling censorship of his father’s letters. He worried that if war broke out, he would never be able to raise his children in Bremen, would never hear the bells of Bremen chime again. Once the United States got involved, Martin feared he would be pressured to spy for Germany. He feared for a while that his phones were tapped. When Bremen was bombed, his anguish intensified, and the sadness over what happened during World War II never left him.

   When Martin and Anna returned to Germany for visits, they found its countryside and its customs wonderful and friendly—and warm with the familiarity of happy childhood memories. But when they thought of the days of turnips and potatoes, then potatoes and turnips—and of the political turmoil and violence that changed their homeland forever—they recognized that their new roots had grown deep into the sand along the Georgia-South Carolina coast.

   For the Stelljes family of Myrtle Island, the menu on New Year’s Day for many years included both Hoppin’ John and herring salad. Other times, there might be watermelon and red cabbage side by side on the table, or even chicken and pickled beets, even potato pancakes covered with corn syrup.

   Martin died in 1994 at the age of ninety-two. Anna, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even one great-great-grandchild continued into the twenty-first century the dual nature of the family’s traditions: playing in the May River and celebrating the customs of their German ancestors. Anna Stelljes died in 2003.