Sam Blaustein was married to my great-great-great aunt, Anna Fenning.  Just as Anna lived in memory as simply Tante Chaje, Sam lived as Uncle Blaustein, these familial names masking their real identities to a certain extent.  My grandfather, for example, wasn’t quite sure who Tante Chaje was, just as our cousin Alan didn’t really know who Uncle Blaustein was or how they were related.  It took me, with some dry facts that supplied this couple’s real names to put it all together -- including the fact that they were a married couple, something neither rememberer knew or recalled.

My grandfather didn’t remember anything about Tante Chaje besides her name.  Indeed, he isn’t sure if he actually ever knew her, or if he just knew her name as a familiar one.  Uncle Blaustein, on the other hand, spent his old age living in the same household as 3 or 4 year old Alan.  Because he was so young at the time, Alan just accepted that Uncle Blaustein was his uncle and that was that.  He assumed, as he grew older, than Uncle Blaustein had been a great-uncle of some kind, but didn’t really give it much thought.  Whatever the case, he knew that his parents and Uncle Blaustein had been close.  After all, they took him into their home when he was an elderly widower and after his death, he left them some property he had owned in the Bronx.  The gift of this property -- it was a tenement apartment or townhouse or something like that -- seems to have been the type of gift where the thought behind the gift, rather than the gift, is the thing that counts.  For when Alan’s father Harry went to go collect rent for the first time, the tenants threatened him and said they’d kill him if he ever came back.  Apparently he left empty handed and never ventured back to collect anything.  I am sort of curious if that really could have been the true end to the story, or if there was actually some undramatic business-like ending Alan never heard about, involving lawyers and evictions and such.  But I am even more curious about how Uncle Sam Blaustein dealt with collecting rent from these tenants.

I know very little additional information about Sam, but I’m glad I was able to put some biographical backstory behind the elderly Uncle Blaustein that Alan remembered.  And I am glad he had this picture that put a face and a tangible personhood to the bare-bones biography I constructed.

Samuel Blaustein (ca 1860-1939)