“Relations” as in “Rabbit's friends and relations” (vide Winnie The Pooh), meaning family relatives; “peripheral,” because I'm going to talk about assorted great-uncles, my one great-aunt, some distant cousins, and my great-grandmother Zlotte, of whom I have only the faintest memory. She was on her deathbed at age 98 (I was only 3 or 4), and we visited her apartment, in Hartford. I remember being led into her room, where she lay in bed, eyes closed, and I was vaguely conscious of who she was, my mother's maternal grandmother. As I later learned, she'd suffered a serious stroke several years earlier and was not expected to live. She'd not only survived, but most of the symptoms of this earlier stroke had improved dramatically with time.On my father's side I had no living grandparents when I was born, and only my great-aunt Anna (Hilda) among my paternal grandparents' siblings. She was always known simply as “Tante,” which means “aunt” in Yiddish. She lived to be 90. I must have met her several times, and can picture her face clearly, but alas have not a single specific memory, except of attending her funeral when I was 25. One of the eulogists, probably the rabbi, got a chuckle from those in attendance by relating how, during Tante's last several years or so, when she no longer could be very active in her congregation, she nevertheless contributed by working at home (in her nursing home), mending or reconstructing by hand the tzitzis or fringes on the tallisim (prayer shawls) worn by the men.

Her husband, Philip, who died before my time, bore the unfortunate distinction in our family of having once been swindled out of his modest life savings and even his wife's small diamond ring, in a bait-and-switch confidence game in which a Yiddish-speaking ethnic Jew collaborated with a non-Jew (the supposed “dumb goy” in the swindle) to relieve naive and credulous fellow Jews of their money. In that era, Great-uncle Phil reportedly just couldn't bring himself to believe that one Jew would ever do such a thing to another.

Tante had a daughter, my father's first-cousin Rose, who kept in touch with our family occasionally, even after she and her own family moved to San Raphael, CA, not far north of San Francisco. I made contact with her in1979, after both of my parents had already passed away, when I was preparing to spend a month in San Francisco. Took the bus to San Raphael, where Rose, then in her late 70s, met me at the bus stop. I spent Passover with her, her husband, their son, and his college-age son and daughter (my second-cousins-once-removed), and we spent this holiday together during my subsequent three springtime trips to San Francisco in the early '80s.

On my mother's side, I had four great-uncles whom I remember. My mom's father (whom I've previously written about in this column) had two living brothers: Paul or “Pinny,” much despised, whom I remember seeing only once, at my grandfather's 100th birthday party, and Joe, whom we saw fairly often at Passover and other family events. Uncle Joe lived in Brooklyn, and was single. He made a meager living selling burial insurance to strapped families and, I believe, often drumming up business simply by going door-to-door in low-rent neighborhoods. He also occasionally earned a little extra during Jewish holidays as a cantor. Uncle Joe had a passable singing voice that he attempted to enhance with dramatic flourishes, such as a sort of theatrical gasp at the beginning of a phrase, which once angered my grandfather for its obvious corniness, and which my brothers and I occasionally enjoy imitating to this day, to much sibling laughter. But all in all, Joe was well liked, if not exactly highly respected.

When my older brother once brought an attractive girlfriend to a family seder, Uncle Joe, then well into his 80s, practically had to be restrained from exhibiting his affection for her too physically. “By Nature, I'm still OK” he proclaimed, as he chased her around the dining room table, and my mother rolled her eyes and whispered to me, “C'mon, he had his prostate removed years ago.”

Several years before his death at 90, when he was briefly hospitalized, Joe complained to everyone about being “surrounded by old, sick people” in the hospital. My father was a dentist and took care of Joe's dental work (gratis); once Uncle Joe complained to him that his new dentures were no good. My father asked him about chewing and eating various kinds of food, and there seemed to be no difficulty with anything he mentioned. “So what's the problem?” “I can't eat grapes,” said Joe. My father replied, “So don't eat grapes!” Joe soon regained full confidence in my father's work: He had misplaced his dentures, and whom do you call when you can't find your dentures? Why, your dentist, of course. My father told him, “I don't know, have you looked under your bed?” Joe did, and found them there. After that, he told everyone what a wonderful dentist my father was.

Uncle Joe had supposedly left home while still in his teens and become a drummer in the Russian army (this was under the Czar), and when I became a professional drummer, it was sometimes said, with a smile, that I must have inherited my musical talent from Uncle Joe.

I also had two great-uncles who were siblings of my mother's mother: Joseph Kotin I remember only faintly, from family gatherings when I was a young child. He'd earned a medical degree when medical schools were far less demanding than they soon afterward became, and he had either never really had a practice or, at any rate, had long since changed to making his living as a real estate broker – which earned the privately-expressed contempt of my father.

My other maternal great-uncle was Uncle Charlie Kotin. Before retirement, he had owned a small garment factory that I believe he'd started himself. My mom was very fond of him, a fondness that seems to have been shared by everyone in the family and, according to family legend at least, by his mostly African-American female employees as well. Supposedly, when some union organizers approached them about joining the ILGWU, their response was, “Oh, you'd have to ask Charlie about that.”

Once when Charlie was well into his 80s, my mother insisted on taking my brothers and me to visit him and his wife, May. They were sitting shiva (ritual mourning period) for some relative, probably on May's side. I was about 30. My brothers and I agreed to come along only reluctantly, but I eventually came to value this visit retrospectively for the opportunity it had afforded to establish a clear image and memory in my mind of Uncle Charlie and Aunt May. May was much beloved by the entire Kotin family, even though she was not herself a blood relative. In 1989, I managed to get myself invited to her 95th birthday celebration, in a hall in NJ. This was of course hosted by her own blood relatives, but my late Uncle Charlie's relations may have been nearly as numerous as the guests from May's family. One of her nephews took the microphone at the very beginning of the formalities and got a big laugh when the first words out of his mouth were, “My brother warned me: he said, ‘Mir vein zikh oystshtopen mit Kotins!'” (We're going to be overrun with Kotins!) May died less than a year short of her 100th birthday.

With the exception of the distant cousins mentioned, these relations were all born in the 1800s, in Eastern Europe. They spent their formative years in what seems today like a different world, and I suspect that if anyone in the family reminisces about me and my brothers 50 or 75 years from now, they will probably make the same observation about us.