Elaine Winer, of East Ridge, uses the “Jewish Holiday Kitchen” cookbook as her guide for making latkes, a kind of potato pancake. Back when she and her husband, Sanford Winer, were raising their children, they held Hanukkah bashes at their house. Few dared venture into the kitchen as Elaine deployed several oil-soaked pans at once — using every burner at her disposal.
“I would make tons of latkes, ” she said. “Tons and tons and tons of latkes.”
Now the Winers’ children are grown and far away, and Thursday night, her latke operation required just two fry pans. As Chabad Chattanooga’s Hanukkah on Ice Menorah Car Parade ran downtown, the longtime couple, whose personal histories in many ways trace that of the greater Jewish community in this town, enjoyed a quiet evening at home.
The Winers’ grandparents were among the millions of mainly East European Jews who immigrated to the U.S. starting around 1890.
Fleeing a draft that was pulling Jewish Latvians into the Russian imperial military (“that was the end of their life basically,” Sanford Winer said), one of his grandfathers, upon coming to America, got connected to a Chattanooga-area Jewish businessman who ran a wholesale pack peddler supply business.