Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by James Konicek
For all I knew as a child, it was in a church basement where Kolaches were
first conceived. My father, the son of immigrants from a small provincial
village in Czechoslovakia, spent a large part of his childhood at church. St.
John Nepomuk, in Racine Wisconsin, a Catholic church, grade school and
essentially a community center for the local Czech population. In addition to
weekly or even daily mass, all major family events were celebrated there. But
it was in the basement of St. John’s where we gathered post eucharist.
Weddings, anniversaries, funerals, baptisms, first communions,
confirmations. It was a sacramental rental hall filled regularly with Uncles,
Aunts, grandparents, grandchildren, cousins, and… Kolaches.
Even more numerous to count than my cousins, that basement birthed tens of
thousands of those crusty doughy pastries over the years. A chewy bread-like
dough stuffed with apricot, raspberry, fig or cheese. Some round, some
oblong. all set atop plastic clothed folding tables and neighbored along side
hot aluminum coffee urns, each one dusted liberally with powdered sugar
and served on paper plates or cocktail napkins.