A few words about my travel companions.
Karl is the son of Freddy, my mother’s youngest brother and the only one of her siblings to be born in Argentina. Freddy came to the U.S. around the same time Mom did. Karl and I knew each other as kids, but since Mom’s death we’ve only seen each other a couple of times—once at Freddy’s funeral, and more recently at our aunt Elisabeth’s ninetieth birthday party.
Tony is the son of Aunt Flora, the woman who, while staying at our house in the 1970s, taught me how to touch type. I got to know Tony and his wife, Silvia, when they were living on Long Island in the ’80s and ’90s; we got along well back then, but people change, and Silvia will later confess that after thirty years, she was worried we might not like each other anymore.
But we do like each other, a lot. We are an amiable group, the missionary zeal that runs in the family being tempered by an easygoing irreverence. Maybe it’s the Argentine influence—or in my case, the Ruff influence. We all have our opinions, but we know how to distinguish between the few beliefs that matter and the many that don’t, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. By the time we return to Buenos Aires, we will have driven nearly eighteen hundred miles together without ever once raising our voices in argument. For Lehenbauers, this is a feat akin to walking on water. I end up being very glad that I accepted Silvia’s invitation.
The first day, we’re on the road by 7 AM. At our breakfast rest stop, Silvia introduces me to the medialuna, Argentina’s version of the croissant, which is smaller than its French cousin and commonly glazed with sugar.
I’m still licking my fingers as we come to first of the many police checkpoints we will encounter on our journey. It looks like the cops have set up a used car lot by the side of the highway. They run Tony’s license and registration before waving us on, and I realize the “used cars” belonged to people whose I.D. didn’t pass muster. Thinking of the burglar bars on the house in Hurlingham, I assume that this has something to do with cracking down on car theft. But Tony explains, in the deadpan way he has, that the reason for the checkpoints is that the police are bored and don’t have enough to do.
It doesn’t take long for us to think of some things they could be doing. The highway is in bad shape; Tony is constantly swerving around potholes, and adding to the obstacle course are many uncollected strips of rubber shed by the retread tires of long-haul trucks. At one point, traffic slows to let a pair of skinny dogs cross the road, but elsewhere we see the corpses of animals that weren’t so lucky. Among these is a creature I take to be a javelina or a wild pig, but which Silvia informs me was a capybara—the first one I have ever seen in the wild. I’m glad I didn’t get a better look at it.
There are also many tollgates, which sparks a joking discussion about what, exactly, the toll money is being spent on. Tony suggests that it goes to pay for the superfluous warning signs marking the worst stretches of unrepaired highway; this becomes a running gag, which Karl and I proceed to drive into the ground. Silvia meanwhile insists we’re looking at it backwards. You need to imagine what the road would be like without the tolls, she says.
For all our good-natured complaining, we know how lucky we are, traveling sixty miles an hour in air-conditioned comfort with only an occasional thrashing of the axles. In Grandpa’s day, not only was there no A/C, there wasn’t even, in the most literal sense, any horsepower, the terrain in Guarany being so rough that he took to riding mules instead:
On another occasion I had bought a number of maps for my schools at Ijuhy. To make sure that they would reach home in a dry state, I wrapped them up in my raincoat and sent them on with a driver. It was a fine, sunny day in winter. I intended to take a round-about way, raising the distance to 20 hours. But I meant to ride this distance without a stop, keeping at it all night, in order not to miss the hour of catechism instruction at home. Towards evening it began to drizzle, and the darker it got, the harder it rained, and the harder it rained, the colder it got. And poor me with only a khaki riding suit! At about seven o’clock we, meaning myself and the mule, fell into a ditch. I have always maintained that this was intentional on the part of the mule. But I did not want to risk it again. By the momentary illumination of a streak of lightning I picked out a thorn bush under which to seek shelter. Not that it was raining less fiercely there, but still there is a certain feeling of protection under a bush, in the midst of the wide plain in rain and lightning and thunder. In order not to tire, I stood first on my eastern leg and then changed about to the western one. The mule did about the same. After nearly twelve hours of this changing about the morning dawned, and the rain abated and finally stopped. The warm sun went to work on my wet clothes, and when after ten more hours in the saddle I reached home, I had no need to fear a scolding for having gotten my nice clothes wet. I even found a long rod of iron on the road, picked it up and returned it to the driver who had lost it, making him very happy.
— Albert Lehenbauer, “Roughing it for Christ in the Wilds of Brazil”
The uniform line of trees in the distance are eucalyptus being grown for timber.
By late afternoon we are in Santo Tomé. We have reservations for the night at the Condado Hotel. When I get to my room I find a slot on the wall, just inside the door, where I have to insert my keycard to turn on the power. This is an energy-saving feature that prevents guests from running the A/C all day while they’re out. It’s a clever idea, and Tony predicts that it will eventually be adopted by American hotels as well, though he notes there are still some kinks to be resolved: removing the keycard turns off all the power, including the socket for the mini-fridge, and of course you can’t leave your devices in the room to charge.
We have dinner in the hotel’s casino, a banquet hall with rows of slot machines. Due to hyperinflation, the Argentine peso is currently trading at a thousand-to-one against the American dollar, which combined with the fact that the peso is denoted by a dollar sign makes for some crazy-looking menu prices. I have a $14,000 steak with fries and a $3,000 bottle of Sprite. Karl orders a $25,000 bottle of wine. The full price of dinner for the four of us comes to $88,000, which Karl insists on paying. He’s being generous, but he’s also hoping that the unconverted peso figure will show up on his credit card bill where his wife will see it.
Santo Tomé is a border town; the next morning we drive to a bridge that crosses the Uruguay River into Brazil. The new visa requirement for American tourists has been postponed until 2025, so all I have to do is fill out a digital form and show my passport. Ten minutes later we’re in the old country.
The landscape on the far side of the river is very similar—farmland with scattered patches of forest—but I notice the Brazilians are growing a different mix of crops, including the soybeans that are Grandpa’s legacy. The highway is in better shape, but the paucity of road signs triggers another round of toll-related jokes. It’s OK, we’ve got GPS to find our way.
We reach Santa Rosa at around 1 PM and drive to the Imigrantes Hotel, our home for the next four nights. Cousins Ingrid and Norma are waiting to greet us (along with Walter, Lia, and Vera, they are the children of Uncle Siegfried, Mom’s eldest sibling). Our rooms aren’t ready yet, but Fenasoja’s organizers have arranged a lunch for us at the fairgrounds, and they’ve also assigned us a minibus for the duration of our stay. Our driver is a very friendly guy named Márcio; later he will ask to take a photo with us, to prove to his family that he was the Lehenbauers’ chauffeur.
We meet up with the other cousins at the fair. Cousin Walter is a big star; his work helping Fenasoja prepare for the centennial has made him the public face of the family, and he’s constantly being pulled aside to do interviews. Lia and Vera are there as well, along with Walter’s wife, Ruth, and Janis and Carolyn, granddaughters of Grandpa’s sister Katharina, whose family now own the West Ely farm.
After lunch we have a brief look around the fairgrounds. Among other things, Fenasoja is a tech expo, with a whole section devoted to the latest farm equipment, everything from drones and tractors up to house-sized harvesters (if you’ve ever wanted to sit in the cockpit of one of those things, you can, though you’ll have to wait your turn behind a line of little kids). They’ve got farm animals too, and amusement park rides, an open-air concert arena, and crafts pavilions offering the expected (leather goods, jewelry, organic preserves) and the unexpected (Brazilian timeshares). I feel sorry for the people trying to sell clothing, especially handknit stuff. When they paid for their booths, they thought Fenasoja would be taking place in May—late autumn—but the six-month delay caused by the floods means it is now the beginning of summer, and with the temperature in the nineties and humidity at seventy percent, nobody is looking to add layers.
It’s a relief to get back to the air-conditioned hotel. We check in, and after a quick shower, I join my cousins for coffee and cake with a woman named Lisete Friske. Ms. Friske is a historian whose research helped make the official case for Grandpa’s foundational role in the Brazilian soy industry.
It turns out that Grandpa did not literally bring the first soybeans to Brazil (though he does get credit for introducing the Common Yellow cultivar, the variety of soy he transported in his bottle). The earliest record of Brazilian soy cultivation was in Bahia at the end of the 19th century. But previous attempts to commercialize soy didn’t go anywhere. Ironically, part of the reason Grandpa’s efforts had such an impact was that he wasn’t worried about profit; he just wanted to make people’s lives better. And crucially, he was a pastor, at a time when the pastor’s word was law. He didn’t have to answer to investors or provide any sort of practical timetable for when his soybean scheme might start to pay off. He just told people to try planting soy and they did, even if they had no earthly idea what it was good for.
This makes sense to me. I remember when I was a kid, the way strangers talking to my Dad would turn instantly deferential when they found out he was a preacher. And that was in the 1960s and ’70s, when the cultural force of organized religion was waning in America. The ability of a pastor to command respect and obedience in rural Brazil in the 1920s would have been much greater. I am glad Grandpa used his power for good—and that his soybean scheme actually did pay off.
In the evening, Márcio drives us into town to a restaurant called Pizzaria Veneza, which is like a dim sum house for Italian flatbread. Waiters circulate with a seemingly endless variety of thin-wedged pizza slices; some of the more exotic toppings include figs, chicken hearts, and Doritos. (There are dessert pizzas too, topped with berries and chocolate, but by the time these make an appearance I’ll already be stuffed.)
We are joined by some of Grandma’s people, the Priebes. Unfortunately, the language barrier prevents me from really connecting with any of them, but through Cousin Walter, I try to get an answer to a question Karl and I have been debating: Where exactly was Grandma born? According to the Lehenbauer Book, the pre-Ancestry.com genealogy of the family, Helene Priebe’s birthplace was “Lubatscheck, Russia,” but if you search for Lubatscheck on Google, the only hit you get is from an online scan of the Lehenbauer Book.
Walter says that nobody really knows the answer. Lubatscheck may well have existed at one time; it wouldn’t be the first Russian village to have vanished without a trace. We do know that the Priebes had roots in Germany and Poland, and that they were probably part of a migrant group of farmers and skilled craftspeople invited into Russia to help modernize the country.
Grandma’s family left Russia just a few years before the outbreak of World War I. Whether that was luck or foresight, Walter can’t say, but he can tell me why they decided to emigrate to Brazil. At the time, immigration officials in the U.S. had a reputation for being very picky about who they let in and who they didn’t; the smallest thing might get you bounced back to Europe. Brazil was known to be far less discriminating. So rather than take their chances at Ellis Island, the Priebes chose to go to Guarany, in the process making it possible for Grandma and Grandpa to meet. I owe my existence to America’s illiberal immigration policy.
On the way back to the hotel, Cousins Lia and Vera share another immigration story. When they first came to the U.S., they lived with Walter in Arkansas, where he was serving as a pastor. Later they moved to New Jersey. When they went to get new driver’s licenses, the woman at the Jersey DMV insisted that there was no such place as Arkansas. As Lia and Vera would know if they were American, the real state was called Kansas; their old licenses were obvious forgeries. Being Lehenbauers, Lia and Vera stood their ground, and the situation escalated until another DMV employee came over and confirmed that Arkansas existed. He knew this because the president was from there.
So thanks to Bill Clinton, Lia and Vera got their New Jersey driver’s licenses.
[Continued in part four.]