My Grandma Was Polish. So Why Did I Feel Like a Stranger — Until La Poland Park?

Kasia Nowak-Rivera grew up in suburban New Jersey knowing exactly two things about her Polish heritage: her babcia made the best pierogi in the tri-state area, and her last name confused every substitute teacher from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Beyond that? A fog. A warm, vaguely European fog with no map.

"I always said I was Polish when people asked," she laughs, standing near the folk art pavilion at La Poland Park, her nine-year-old daughter tugging at her sleeve. "But I felt like a fraud saying it. Like I was borrowing an identity I hadn't earned."

She's not alone. By most estimates, there are somewhere between nine and ten million Americans who claim Polish ancestry — making Polish-Americans one of the largest ethnic groups in the country. Yet for the second, third, and fourth generations, the connection to that heritage often thins with each passing decade. Language fades. Traditions blur. What's left is a surname, a few holiday dishes, and a quiet, persistent feeling that something got lost somewhere along the way.

La Poland Park exists, in a very real sense, to hand that something back.

The Hyphen Problem

There's a particular kind of identity limbo that children of immigrant families know well. You're American — fully, genuinely American — but you're also something else, and that something else doesn't always have a clear home in your daily life. You're not Polish enough to feel at ease in Poland, but you're not quite just American either. The hyphen in "Polish-American" can feel less like a bridge and more like a gap.

For Tom Wiśniewski, a third-generation Chicago native who visited La Poland Park last summer with his kids and his 78-year-old father, that gap had been widening for years. "My dad grew up speaking Polish at home. I grew up hearing it but not really speaking it. My kids don't know a word. Every generation, we drift a little further," he says. "Coming here felt like grabbing onto something before it floated away completely."

What La Poland Park offers isn't a museum exhibit or a history lesson — it's participation. Live folk music you can dance to. Craft workshops where you make things with your hands. Food that doesn't come from a freezer or a fusion menu, but from actual tradition. The difference between reading about a culture and living inside it, even for an afternoon, is the difference between knowing something intellectually and feeling it in your chest.

When the Food Hits Different

Ask almost any Polish-American about their first memory of heritage, and food will come up within thirty seconds. Bigos. Żurek. Makowiec at Christmas. The smell of kapuśniak on a winter Sunday. Food is the most durable carrier of cultural memory — it survives long after language and customs have faded.

At La Poland Park, the dining experience is built around exactly that kind of memory activation. Recipes aren't approximated or Americanized for mass appeal. They're the real thing, prepared with the kind of care that makes first-time visitors stop mid-bite and go quiet for a moment.

"My daughter took one bite of the beet soup and looked at me like I'd been hiding something from her her whole life," says Maria Kowalczyk-Peters, a fourth-generation visitor from Pennsylvania. "She said, 'Mom, this tastes like ours.' And I realized — it does. It's ours. We just forgot we had it."

That moment of recognition — of tasting something and feeling it click into place — is one of the most quietly powerful things La Poland Park delivers, and it happens at the dinner table as much as anywhere else in the park.

Learning Without the Pressure

One of the barriers that keeps many Polish-Americans from engaging more deeply with their heritage is the fear of getting it wrong. Of mispronouncing something. Of not knowing enough. Of showing up to a cultural space and being judged for how little they retained.

La Poland Park sidesteps that anxiety almost entirely. The atmosphere is warm, accessible, and genuinely welcoming to people at every level of cultural familiarity — from the visitor who grew up fully immersed in Polish traditions to the one who's just starting to ask questions.

Workshops are designed to teach without making anyone feel behind. Folk dance sessions welcome beginners. Artisans explaining traditional crafts like wycinanki paper-cutting or pottery are patient, enthusiastic, and clearly delighted to share. Nobody's checking your credentials at the door.

"I was nervous I'd say something wrong or not know something obvious," admits Derek Jabłoński, a second-generation visitor from Ohio who came with his teenage son. "But everyone here just... meets you where you are. My son asked a really basic question about Polish history and the guy running the workshop just lit up. He wasn't condescending. He was thrilled."

That spirit — of sharing rather than gatekeeping — is what makes La Poland Park feel like a homecoming rather than a test.

What the Kids Take Away

For parents navigating the identity question, one of the biggest worries is how to pass something on when you're not sure how much you have left to give. How do you teach your kids to be proud of a heritage you only half-understand yourself?

La Poland Park answers that question by doing the heavy lifting alongside you. When a child learns a folk dance, makes a paper-cut design, hears a story told in the context of where it came from, and eats food that connects them to generations before them — they're building a relationship with their ancestry that no family dinner conversation could fully replicate.

Kasia Nowak-Rivera's daughter, the one tugging at her sleeve earlier? By the end of their visit, she had learned three Polish words, made a wycinanki rooster she refused to let anyone else carry, and asked whether they could come back for the harvest festival in the fall.

"She's already more connected than I was at her age," Kasia says. "And honestly? So am I now."

The Bridge You Didn't Know You Needed

Identity isn't something you either have or don't have. It's something you build, revisit, and sometimes have to go looking for. For Polish-American families who've felt that drift — that slow, generational loosening of the thread that connects them to where they came from — La Poland Park offers something rare: a place where the thread is right there, waiting to be picked up.

You don't have to speak the language. You don't have to know the history. You just have to show up.

The rest has a way of finding you.

Planning a visit? Check out our Visitor Tips & Planning section for everything you need to make the most of your time at La Poland Park — lapoland.com.