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the nicest things about the transplanted Englishman. “For ten years we have worked with Mr. Watkins, who has always faithfully fulfilled the requirements of the railroad,” wrote HilmarTavares da Silva in a letter to Brazilian authorities attesting to Wolf’s good conduct in business. “He is a person of absolute moral and material integrity.”
    It is not clear why Wolf saw the need to become a Brazilian citizen after living quite successfully in the country for nearly thirty-one years as a foreigner. Perhaps he wanted to consolidate his business and make sure that it survived after his death. In October 1950, Wolf and Annita began to collect the letters of reference and undergo the medical examinations that would enable them to apply for Brazilian citizenship. In the black-and-white photo pasted to his Brazilian identity card, Wolf wears wire-rimmed spectacles and has a receding hairline. Annita, fifty at the time, is a heavyset woman with a double chin and a short, tightly curled coiffure. Her severely plucked eyebrows lend her a hard, defiant air.
    Part of the citizenship application involved describing their children’s activities in Brazil. To this end, both Wolf and Annita focused on Lily, who was their only minor child at the time.
    While the Watkinses sought their Brazilian citizenship, Lily was well on her way to making a splash in Rio society—at least as it was defined within the city’s upper-middle-class Jewish and English-speaking communities. Lily was enrolled at the Colegio Anglo-Americano, a traditional British-American private school, housed in a handsome colonial building that had once belonged to a Portuguese duke. The school was next door to the Sears department store in the Botafogo neighborhood, where the country’s best schools were clustered. Known as the British American School when it was founded in 1919, the school was re-christened with a Portuguese name after President Vargas declared—in a fit of nationalistic fervor during World War II—that all educational and religious institutions in the country had to have Portuguese names.
    Margareth Coney, the no-nonsense British matron who founded the school, duly changed the school’s name but continued to direct its strict programming until just before her death in 1968. Coney hadarrived in Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the last century to work as a governess for one of Brazil’s wealthiest families. By the time her contract with the family was over, Coney had begun to look for other opportunities. She bemoaned the lack of proper educational facilities for the growing colony of English-speaking immigrants in Rio de Janeiro and decided that the city needed a proper British school. The British American School soon became a tough training ground for the sons and daughters of British and American expatriates in the city, and offered Brazilian students the opportunity to become fluent in English, which was the working language of the school. Lily herself speaks a refined international English as well as Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Her multilingual skills would later prove excellent assets in elite society.
    By the beginning of the Second World War, Coney had developed an impressive educational institution in Brazil that drew upper-middle-class students, although it never attained the social prestige of the elite Catholic schools, such as Notre Dame de Sion, Santo Inacio, and Dom Pedro, where the old money coffee and sugar barons sent their children.
    The Colegio Anglo-Americano was particularly popular among well-to-do Jewish families in Rio who didn’t want to send their children to schools with Christian affiliations, although Jewish children were welcome in the Jesuit-run institutions throughout the city. In many cases, Jewish parents who worried about their social standing in the city sent their children to the Catholic institutions, but insisted that they not participate in any of the