My grandfather, Walter Max Staab, emigrated from eastern Germany to Hoboken as a teenager in the 1930s. Times were tough in Europe, and like so many immigrants before and after him, he thought he would be better off in the United States.
A trained auto mechanic, my grandfather found work at a garage somewhere in Hudson County, but it didn’t last long. He did a good job though—perhaps too good of a job. His boss told him he should mess with the cars, make small cuts in hoses and other damage, whatever he had to do to guarantee return customers. My grandfather refused and was forced to quit.
Finding another job was near impossible. After World War I, anti-German sentiment was strong, even in an area with a large German population. My grandfather couldn’t hide his accent, and he was turned away from many opportunities. Finally, the owner of Helmers’, a fellow German immigrant, hired him as a dishwasher. My grandfather was soon promoted to cook and his food was so delicious that he was later recruited to be a chef at the upscale Union Club, a Hoboken landmark that has since closed.
Helmers’ still offers really good, simple German food, the kind I remember having at my grandfather’s home in North Bergen. Though he eventually returned to his roots working as a mechanic at the Tootsie Roll Factory in Hoboken (and retiring as a foreman at the Garden State Paper Company in Garfield), my grandfather remained passionate about cars and food. He could speak on those topics for hours, telling the same stories my siblings and I had heard maybe three times before with the same wide-eyed enthusiasm.
My grandfather, our family’s patriarch, passed away when he was 93 years old and I was a freshman in college. Now that I have started a family of my own in Hoboken, I wish I could visit him. Instead, I visit Helmers’.