“While latkes sizzle, may the glow of Hanukkah bring warmth to your heart and home.”

Belarusian draniki aren’t just potato pancakes — they’re the kind of food that carries whole countries, whole families, whole histories on their backs. Crisp on the outside, tender inside, fried in enough oil to make the kitchen glow, they were born in the fields and forests of old Belarus, where potatoes became a second religion sometime in the 19th century. And for families like mine — Jewish families from places like Brest-Litovsk, the little border town my ancestors called home — draniki were more than a meal.

They were survival, celebration, and identity rolled into one golden, sizzling disc.

At their core, they’re simple: grated potatoes, grated onion, an egg or two, maybe a little flour, salt, pepper, and a hot pan of oil. But simplicity doesn’t mean small. When you fry a pancake in a cold corner of Eastern Europe, you’re drawing from centuries of necessity — the kind of necessity that teaches you to take a cheap, abundant crop and turn it into comfort. Into something that could feed a family, feed a community, feed a holiday.

And then came the Ashkenazi twist — latkes. Same soul, different name. Same crunch, different story. Every Hanukkah, Jewish homes in Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, and beyond filled with the sound of oil hissing and the smell of potatoes caramelizing. Not because it was fancy, but because it meant something. Because eating fried food was a way to remember a miracle, to bring a little ancient light into the long, dark Eastern European winter.

Hanukkah at my house always meant these pancakes — the Belarusian draniki my ancestors carried with them, repackaged as latkes but still unmistakably from the old world. You could hear generations in the scrape of the grater, taste old-country practicality in every bite. Sour cream for the grown-ups, applesauce for the kids, and a frying pan that never seemed to get a break.

And the thing about draniki is that they travel well — across borders, across cultures, across wars and migrations and the kind of upheaval Eastern Europe knows all too well. You’ll find cousins of this dish in Russia, Ukraine, Poland — each claiming it, each defending their version as the “real” one. But that’s the beauty of it. Something so humble becomes a shared language.

Today, in Belarus they’re still eaten the old way — hearty, golden, and unmistakably homegrown. In Jewish homes, they appear as latkes, lighting up Hanukkah tables with the same bright crunch they offered a century ago. Two names, one spirit.

Because in the end, it doesn’t matter what you call them — draniki, latkes, potato pancakes. The meaning is the same: a recipe passed down in whispers, in holidays, in migration, in memory.

A crisp reminder that even the simplest foods can carry a world with them.