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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Cupertino resident Andja Bjeletich recently celebrated her 100th birthday on Oct. 25. Bjeletich has two great-great-grandchildren and still lives on her own.
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Long Road
Over the last 100 years, Andja Bjeletich has endured a life of struggles
By Amy Jenkins
Andja Bjeletich's apartment is still decorated with flowers and a banner that reads "Happy 100th Birthday Baba." She reached the century mark Oct. 25. Baba means grandmother in her native language, Serbian.
More than 300 family members, friends and community members attended the birthday party Oct. 27 at St. Michael's Hall in Saratoga. Family traveled from Yugoslavia, Canada, France, Texas, Washington state, and Butte, Mont., where Bjeletich lived for 30 years after immigrating to America from Yugoslavia.
At the party Cupertino Mayor Sandra James gave a speech and awarded the honoree with a proclamation for actively participating in the Cupertino community and for her involvement in her church, St. Sava. For 25 years she baked the bread, called the prosfora, used in the church liturgy. Furthermore, parishioners from the Serbian Orthodox Church she attended in Butte, Mont., gave her a painting of the church.
A native of the mountain village of Trepca near the town of Niksic Montenegro in Yugoslavia, Bjeletich immigrated to the United States in April 1930 then to Cupertino in 1961, after her husband, George Perov Bjeletich, died, in order to live near her daughter, Helen, and son-in-law, Roy Adzich. Now, according to Helen, all three live on the same street in Cupertino. She says her mother helped raise her children, and they, along with many other family members, visit Bjeletich often.
Bjeletich has 13 grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren. One great-grandchild, named Andja, was born in 1999 to Marko and Elissa Bjeletich and already has uncanny similarities to her namesake.
Bjeletich has framed pictures of all her grandchildren surrounding a large portrait of herself on her living room wall.
"Everyone in my family is good to me; they never say anything bad to me," Bjeletich says. "My family gets together all the time, and they like to be together, hopefully even after I die."
She is one of 11 siblings, four sisters and six brothers. Life was very difficult in the mountainous terrain of Montenegro, especially for females, Bjeletich says. She explains it was considered shameful for women to be educated and that she never attended a day of school in her life. Instead, she was forced to take care of the horses, sheep and cows that her family owned.
These limitations didn't stop her from learning how to read and write Serbo-Croatian, so that later in life she was able to teach all her children the language, as well as communicate with her daughter, who lived in Canada, and with relatives in the old country.
Photograph courtesy of Andja Bjeletich
Andja Bjeletich, 100, holds her namesake and great-granddaughter, 2, for a photo.
Bjeletich endured many physical hardships and personal tragedies while growing up, including witnessing her father and oldest brother die on the same day in a battle during World War I in 1916. Following this tragedy, she was forced to perform manual labor, building a macadamized road for a meager remuneration of food for her family.
Enduring these hardships has made her a strong person, Helen says. "She's a fighter and able to accept things even though she's been faced with lots of problems," she says.
Bjeletich met her husband, George Perov Bjeletich, in 1921 when she was just 20 years old, and he returned from America to stay with her brother-in-law. It was not considered proper for her to speak to him, but he asked Bjeletich's sister if she would accept a marriage proposal from him. After discussing it with her mother and brother-in-law, Bjeletich accepted his proposal.
The next time the two saw each other was on their wedding day, April 9, 1922. George became a U.S. citizen while he was mining gold in Alaska and traveling the country between April 1906 and 1921. Before becoming a gold miner he traveled around the country looking for any work for unskilled laborers, in Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and Arizona.
When George returned to Yugoslavia with the money he had saved while working in Alaska, the two got married. The day following the wedding, he was summoned to Serbia to negotiate a deal to buy property while Andja stayed with her husband's parents and tended sheep. Near the end of 1923, Andja gave birth to her first child, Robert, and then in 1925 to her second son, Dan.
Political instability in the country and setbacks in his real estate led to George's return to America in 1926 to work in the copper mines of Butte, Mont. When George accumulated enough money, he sent for Andja and their two children in 1930, during the start of the Depression. During the Depression she gave birth to Helen in 1931 and John in 1933.
Andja is very proud of the fact that she managed to travel to France by train, take a ship to New York, and travel by train to Butte, Mont., without being able to speak a word of English.
During the end of World War II in 1945, Andja started mailing packages of food, clothing and other essentials desperately needed by friends and family in Europe. Between 1945 and 1954 she sent approximately 200 packages, which were very much appreciated. She said when she visited her homeland people came from out of the hills and treated her like royalty.
Andja says the last time she visited Yugoslavia was in 1978, when she went with her grandson George, and they stayed for two months.
Andja has spent the last 40 years in Cupertino helping to nurture her grandchildren and watch them grow. She says she likes Cupertino because it is warmer weather than in Butte, Mont. She doesn't know what has kept her feeling healthy at 100 years of age, but she says that until last year, she was able to see and hear a lot better than she can now.
Helen says her mother has always been a Democrat and "women's libber" before the term was popular. She says she was happy to come to America and be able to vote for Franklin Roosevelt. Her family says she has many friends, works hard to keep them, and that once you know her, you never forget her.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
