[00:00:00] Jan Almasy: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Apex Podcast. As always, I am your host, Jan Almasy. And today I am joined by my co-host and partner in crime on another segment of the show that you might recognize, The Disruptor, Mr. John Kuntdz.
John, how's it going, brother?
[00:00:18] John Kundtz: I'm great, buddy. How are you?
[00:00:19] Jan Almasy: I'm fantastic.
I am so excited for this episode today. It's going to be a little bit different for everybody listening. This is going to be an episode in that we are going to take our standard, mantra a little bit off track. It's still going to be ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things.
But, me and John both have a little bit of personal investment in this episode. Because... For those of you who don't know, I'm Slovak, and John is something over there in that same area, and we'll explore that a little bit more as we get into the episode.
[00:00:54] John Kundtz: We'll enlighten a little bit on mine and David's ethnic confusion, as we like to call it.
[00:01:00] Jan Almasy: Yeah, that'll make a lot more sense as the episode progresses.
But, as John just said there, we have a third person here with us. For those of you who are listening by the name of David and John, I would love to allow you to make that introduction since he is your family.
Our guest today, and actually, we were prepping for another interview on the Disruptor theme, and we decided to have a little segment or segue into our family history.
[00:01:24] John Kundtz: And so on the phone is my uncle, my dad's brother, David Kundtz, who is, in his own right, an ordinary person who does extraordinary things. He's written a number of books. He's run a very successful, family practice and counseling practice.
Part of what we want to do today is, capture some of this knowledge of our family history on one gentleman, my great grandfather and David's grandfather, Theodore Kundtz, who really was an ordinary person who accomplished extraordinary things.
So David, why don't you give a little better introduction of yourself and your background, and then I'll tell a little story on how we brought you into this?
[00:02:05] David Kundtz: Yeah. Great. John. Great to be with both of you. Okay. Yeah. I'm from Cleveland originally and, went out West in, the 1960s as a Catholic priest and spent 20 years in the Diocese of Idaho serving as a priest.
And then a couple of years of that also in South America and Cali, Columbia, came back, then shortly after that left ministry, got retrained out here in California in Berkeley at the Graduate Theological Union and began a private practice as a family, psychotherapist, did that for 20 years.
In the meantime, wrote several books, as John mentioned, in the areas of popular psychology and spirituality, and I am now retired. The focus of our, conversation today is the place of origin of our, of my grandfather and John's great-grandfather, Theodor Kundtz, which is Medzev, Slovakia. Or, historically, Metzenseifen.
Recently I was looking at Metzenseifen's website, and I realized from the time the town was founded, like in the early, or no, it was the late 13th century, there are dozens of names for this place. And everyone is a little bit different, but you can find a family resemblance in all the names.
And the most current one, of course, is Medzev, Slovakia, which leads, of course, John, into our family confusion. Do you want to say something about that?
[00:03:42] John Kundtz: So it's funny that's why we're calling this ethnic confusion.
I gave a presentation a while back called, why can't I find the city where my family is from? It started before World War I when, my great-grandfather, David's grandfather, emigrated to the United States.
From what I could tell David, the region was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and as it was explained to me, the Germans came over the Carpathian mountains and settled in what we always learned was Metzenseifen and therefore they spoke German, but were technically Hungarian because of The Austrian Hungarian Empire. The reason Jan and I got speaking is at one point, Jan, you were traveling to Toronto, and we were talking on the phone, and you were going across the border, this was back before things shut down, and you were, said you were headed to, and I always going to mispronounced because my Slovakian is not very good. Or Slovak Košice, is that how you say it?
[00:04:42] Jan Almasy: Košice
[00:04:43] John Kundtz: Košice
[00:04:44] Jan Almasy: That's pretty close.
[00:04:45] John Kundtz: It just takes me a while. So you were headed there? I looked on a map, and I go holy cow, Košice is only like 35 kilometers from Metzenseifen, and so that's how we got this whole thing going. And now I'm starting to realize, okay, yeah, so we are part of the Slovak Republic, and you got Poland to the north and Hungary to the south and the Czech Republic and Australia to the west and Ukraine and Russia to the east.
I've been trying to resolve this ethnic confusion for the last few years. David, you were one of the last, actually, I think you certainly are the only one, maybe the only one in your generation. I don't believe anybody in my generation has traveled to Medzev. And I know you did, and that's part of why I wanted to, capture some of that recollection.
[00:05:33] David Kundtz: Yeah, gladly. And we also have a connection, Jan, to, Košice and I might just mention that quickly. And that is my uncle Theodore, who was my grandfather Theodore's, oldest surviving child. So my uncle Ted, we called him, he went to school in Košice, and I looked up the school. It was something like the Kershaw Academy, and I couldn't find any reference to it, but he was sent there from Lakewood, Ohio, to Košice, to go to, I think it was high school. I think it was a Catholic Boy's High School. And he went there with Father William Kundtz, who was Theodore's cousin, I believe. He eventually left the priesthood, married, and had a couple of kids, whom... my older relatives have been in touch with, so anyway, that's a slight but interesting connection to Košice.
[00:06:35] John Kundtz: yeah, okay, my partner Bob and I went to, the visit to Slovakia in 2008. Let me give you a little background on how we got there. There's a man by the name of Heinz Ner, who lives in, Berlin, and he is the administrator and the operator of the Metzenseifen website, and he put me in touch with Karo and Valeria Flakbart. Now, Valeria Flakbartova, I think they say, is the mayor, was the mayor, I think still is the mayor of Medzev and Karol is a scientist. He studies temperatures and some very esoteric kinds of science in Košice. He's a serious physicist. I looked him up this morning to try to see if I could get some background I'm a scientist by training, and what he was publishing what I read today was like right over my head.
[00:07:32] David Kundtz: wonderful people, and they gave Bob and me this wonderful tour of Metzenseifen, and we figured we'd go there, rent a car, and drive around and look and see if we could find a gravesite or something. But with this introduction through Hans Schluschner to Karol Flachbart and Valeria Flachbartova, who was the mayor.
We were treated like royalty, the favorite son’s relatives. So we were, given lunch and a tour of the mayor's office and then brought to the hammers, which are the traditional, industry of, Metzenseifen and just treated just wonderfully. So it was a really magnificent experience.
And I finally resolved our ethnic confusion, John. When Theodore came to this country in 1852, I believe he told most people when asked that he was German, and that was because he had this intense identity with the Germans all the way, I believe, from the 13th century, it was founded by Germans, and they kept that ethnic identity very strongly, so he said that he was German.
I believe that's what he did. Of course, I don't know. He died the year I was born, so I didn't know him. But I got that information from my father. We're German. No, we're not German—the name's German. The founding fathers of the town in the 13th century were German, and many immigrants who came since were German, but we're Slovak.
We're Slovakian. Had he a passport today, it would be a Slovakian passport. So I proudly say I'm Slovak Hungarian. I think you have to include the Hungarians because of the background of the empire there—the ethnic confusion. Is understandable, but now, I think, resolved. I think we get it.
What I've also found is that many people who trace their roots back to this area have the same problem.
[00:09:29] Jan Almasy: I was going to say something that's really interesting about the way that you're explaining that. It's in the modern day when I was looking into Medzev and how to describe it geographically in the modern context. What's really cool is that it's actually, so Slovakia is divided up into regions, right?
And then we explained, a little bit before the microphone came on, that my cousin, Josef Jarab, is actually the bishop of the Spiš region at Košice, or at, Spiška Kapitula. And then Medzev, if you look at it in the context of the way they have that split up, it's actually a part of the region of Košice, and then it's listed...
I think its postal area is Košice-okolie, which means essentially on the outskirts of Košice. Okay. Okay. Yes. So there's there's the actual Koshice, the city, and then there's Sady na Torisu, which is where Zhdoba and Bister and all of my mom's villages are located. And then there's Košice-okolie which is like the outermost circle of that area. And Medzev fits right inside of Košice-okolie
[00:10:34] David Kundtz: okay. That's cool.
[00:10:36] Jan Almasy: Yeah. So we're both still apart. You guys are a little bit further out of the concentric circles, but we're, we're all still a part of the same County, essentially.
[00:10:46] David Kundtz: When we visited, they brought us into the church there, which is, I forget the name of the church, but as we walked into the church.
Over, over the high altar, there's that big Ballacchino over the altar and printed in Latin over the altar was “this church was renovated in 1931 by Theodore Kundtz”. So there was no doubt about that. Everyone who went to mass there, every day saw his name. And so, it became very clear to us that he was one of their celebrated.
Yeah, there's the church. Yeah. In the foothills of the Carpathians. Yeah. Beautiful little church.
[00:11:24] John Kundtz: Beautiful. It's the Mary Queen of Angels Church. Mary Queen of Angels. It's pretty much, you can see it, it's up here in this upper, for those watching, it's way up, it's always in, it's very tall, it's probably the tallest building in the village.
[00:11:38] Jan Almasy: That's very popular in a lot of the Slavic cities, is that the church steeple is one of the highest. Fun fact, Spiš is actually one of the only areas where the church steeple isn't. The highest thing in the area, and it's because when the king built Spishka Hrad on top of the mountain He had to build it on the mountain.
That was one step up from the monastery. So, the Spishka region is one of the only ones where the castle is actually higher than the church steeple
[00:12:06] David Kundtz: yeah, that would be rare. One of the enjoyments we had from our trip to this area was in Budapest. My grandfather was part of a group of citizens, I think, maybe, an international group of citizens, to erect a statue of George Washington in Budapest.
And so we, we were told that it was in a park in Budapest and that's all we knew. So we went into Varosli Varoslicet, I'm not sure I'm saying that it's a great huge park in the middle of Budapest and searched for it for several hours until we finally found the statue of George Washington and there it was, big as life, and my grandfather, one of the things when I say that he said that he was German, he was also very dedicated to Hungarian causes.
In fact, he helped build, the Hungarian center. In Cleveland, he helped erect this statue of George Washington in Budapest. He also identified as Hungarian, but the language was always German. My father spoke a little German, but he didn't have a word of Hungarian. That was the strength of that.
[00:13:19] John Kundtz: None of us knew any Hungarian growing up.
[00:13:21] David Kundtz: No, no, not at all.
[00:13:23] John Kundtz: If you run into people in Cleveland today and they recognized our last name, the ones that do 100 percent call themselves Hungarian descendants.
And it's actually one of the reasons there's such a big Hungarian population in the city of Cleveland is because Theodore was looking for workers. And, he helped, bring people over to work in his factory. He was a cabinet maker and made sewing machine cabinets, bicycle rims, church furniture, and school furniture. and that's one point even made automobile bodies when they were made out of wood. That's right. Which. Actually leads me to an interesting question, David, that you may have, I don't know if you've contemplated it, but Medzev or Metzenseifen is not known for cabinet makers.
[00:14:10] David Kundtz: It's not.
[00:14:11] John Kundtz: It's known more for, Blacksmiths, for lack of a better word, Metal workers.
[00:14:15] David Kundtz: The hammers. They took us to the hammers. We made a visit to the hammers, and the man who runs the hammers came out and put them into operation for us.
This was the extent they went to, to be welcoming to us, and yes. So I was also having the same question, John, that you had. Why wasn't our grandfather or great-grandfather, why wasn't he in the metallurgy business? On the website, it also says that there was a workshop run by a man by the name of Tischler who did, wood joining and carpentry.
So I'm convinced that our ancestors must have, learned carpentry from them. But that was definitely the second most important, industry in Metzenseifen. In that website entry, it said, they made coffins, and they made desks, and they made furniture and anything made from wood. So when Theodore came to this country, he knew wood.
That's what he knew was woodworking. And, of course, that's what his company went on to make. Anything made of wood, all kinds of buildings in Cleveland, the courthouse. In fact, John, I don't know if you knew this, but the original Cleveland stadium on the lakefront, all the seats in that stadium were made by the Theodore Kundtz company.
So he was very well trained in woodworking.
[00:15:41] John Kundtz: I actually have a brochure that I was able to find advertising the fact that the old municipal stadium in Cleveland whatever was 81, 000 seats were all from the Theodore Kundtz company.
[00:15:54] David Kundtz: The Theodore kundtz company, yeah. At one time he was, I think, the largest employer in Cleveland at one time.
[00:16:03] John Kundtz: That was my recollection as well.
[00:16:05] David Kundtz: There's a story I have about, Hungarian people in Cleveland. To make a long story short, when I was home from a summer vacation from college, my mother asked me to take a chair down to Buckeye Road to have it, reupholstered. So I brought the chair down and, and the reupholsterer was saying, Are you, in a very heavy accent, are you related to Theodore Kundtz?
And I said, Yes, he's my grandfather. Oh my God. He went on and on about how wonderful he was, and he worked for him, and his father worked for him. And he said, as a memento, I'll give you this letter opener. And it was a letter opener that had the Theodore Kundtz seal on it. And I still have it and treasure it.
And he said, But please, give me, find me another letter opener. So I went out to a Woolworths drugstore and got this crummy old plastic letter opener. I was just a kid, what did I know? And so I gave it to him, and he looked at it and said, okay, you can have it. Yeah, he was very well-known in Cleveland at that time.
In fact, his picture was on the Rapid Transit. Do you remember seeing that, John?
Yeah, that's good. So yeah, these, I've got a couple of these letter openers that are, we've been able to dig up. It's pretty cool. Good things, but yeah.
[00:17:19] Jan Almasy: I'm curious, so the book said that he had ten children.
[00:17:26] David Kundtz: Yes, several died. Yeah, a very large family. In fact, he was originally married to Agnes. And I don't know Agnes's last name, and she was barren. And so they divorced, and he remarried his wife, Maria Balash.
Who is also from Metzenseifen, but I don't believe, I don't believe Maria was born there. I think she was born in Cleveland but from Metzenseifen. And they went on to have ten children. The first one, Josie, died in infancy. The second one was Theodore, who I mentioned went to school in Košice.
And then there they are. Yeah, from Dorothy, my father Ewald, Marie, Angie, Aunt Angie who lived out here in Carmel, Uncle Leo, my godfather, and Aunt Irene, yeah. And when you look at them, those people, they're, they're not German. They're, they have this, very, What down the down to earth peasant quality to them.
They're big people. they're not a little Aryan Blonde-haired Germans at all. No, they're Slovak
[00:18:46] Jan Almasy: Yeah, it's funny looking at those names because I have an aunt Dorothy My dad, or my grandfather's sister, was Aunt Irene. We have an Angie in our family. I swear on everything, man. We have the same names.
We have even the same
[00:19:01] David Kundtz: names. Yeah, and Leo was, Leo was Leopold. not anything else. And Ewald, from Ewald, from the forest. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah,
[00:19:13] John Kundtz: it's been one of the challenges in trying to put the history together because everybody kept renaming everybody the same names, and sometimes, even in the same generation, they would be the same name.
[00:19:24] David Kundtz: And then our great-grandfather was Michael Kundt.
The name was changed when he came to this country. I don't know if it was when he came into the country or later, I'm not sure when the name was changed, but there are several spellings of that name. Often it's K U N T Z. And other, many, there's many different spellings of it.
One of the things we really enjoyed in our visit to Metzenseifen was a visit to the cemetery. And so many names are just there. And then we saw my great-grandparents. grave there. And it was really, very emotional
[00:20:04] Jan Almasy: a cemetery in, was the cemetery there, were they above ground or were they in the ground?
[00:20:14] David Kundtz: my recollection, Jan, is that they were both, I think, mostly in the ground. But the gravestone for my great-grandparents was quite large. I remember that. It was larger than I expected it to be. I don't know why, but it was, but I think it was both.
[00:20:35] Jan Almasy: Yeah, they do look a lot. Yeah,
[00:20:37] John Kundtz: here's a quick picture from the cemetery that I was able to dig up years ago. and yeah, it does look like there's some above-ground and some below-ground.
[00:20:47] Jan Almasy: The only reason I ask is that in my family's, in Košicewhen somebody passes away. Over there, it's a whole, like the entire village gets involved because everybody's so intimately connected. My parents grew, up or my mom grew up in a town where there are maybe 30 houses. which is, good and bad. But, they would have these like ceremonies cause you could walk to the church and then you can walk from the church to the cemetery. And I guess the ground, specifically around that region of Košice, is. Not very conducive to being in the ground, so the entire cemetery where our family is buried is all these massive granite slabs that are above the ground and headstones that are massive, huge, and they're way bigger than I would have ever expected. It's very ornate. Over there compared to here.
[00:21:40] David Kundtz: Yeah. So we had a similar experience with that. Yeah. Huh. The other thing that came up for us in our visit was the presence of the Roma people in that area. And, they have also always been, I think, historically, a huge challenge for all of the world.
But, one of Valeria Flakbartova's initiatives was a program to give employment to Roma people, which I thought was really a neat thing. And she had them, I forget exactly what the details of the industry were, but to give them work to keep them out of the trouble that they normally get into with governments and authorities.
So I was really, I really admired her for trying to really do something positive about that particular challenge in the area.
[00:22:26] Jan Almasy: Did they call, for the Romani or the Roma people, did they ever use the word Ciganka or Cigani?
[00:22:32] David Kundtz: Ciganyoks. I remember the word Ciganyoks from my youth, but I don't think so.
Do you remember John? Yeah. There's this tradition in our family. There's, they must've been Hungarians. I don't know where they were from. Maybe they were from Metzenseifen, but they were musicians. And I think, were they Roma people, John? Were they?
[00:22:53] John Kundtz: They were always gypsies,
[00:22:55] David Kundtz: gypsies, which is not a very favorable term. I don't think to use it. No, but I think they were Roma people. And I think they were musicians, and they would come every Christmas and serenade our family with this gypsy, this music. And it was, it was a big deal in our family. John, you remember.
[00:23:17] John Kundtz: Oh yeah, I remember explicitly every, we'd always go to our parents, father and mother, my grandparents on Christmas Eve and every year for years, even on two, two different houses.
These guys would show up, and they would be four or five of them. And one would have A violin, another might have a cello or another bass, and they, yeah, I remember the big bass, and they would sing, and they do a couple songs. And I believe they also went to Uncle Leo's house. I think they went to Leo's house as well.
Yeah. And whoever they could find, but I remember them. Yeah. And we used to call them the Ciganyoks.
[00:23:56] David Kundtz:
Ciganyoks Jan, you used the word, though. that's slightly different. Is it a similar route? I bet,
[00:24:04] Jan Almasy: yeah. Cigany, I think it was the way that it came over; the way that you guys are saying it maybe is like a slightly filtered Americanized version, probably.
Conglomeration of the other because it almost sounds like when I was a kid, my grandfather went to a church called Sacred Heart. Parish here in Canton, Ohio, and it was all Slovak people. They all came over here. They all worked at Republic Steel. They all lived in the same neighborhood.
The Slovak club was right down the street from the Polish club. And it was everything like that. And they had this group called the Slovak singers. And we would sing Cigany music, and it was, like that, like a gypsy, a mixture between gypsy music and a polka, essentially.
[00:24:51] David Kundtz: That's the kind of music I remember. Very fast paced and rhythmic, yeah.
[00:24:57] John Kundtz: And they would dance around a little bit.
[00:24:59] David Kundtz: It was wonderful. It was a wonderful tradition.
[00:25:01] John Kundtz: It was cool. I remember it explicitly. It was always like, here they come. I'm wondering if it's just. None of us knew actually how to pronounce the word correctly.
[00:25:09] David Kundtz: I think Jan's right about that. I think it's an anglicize mispronunciation.
[00:25:16] John Kundtz: It's the Hungarian, German, English, Slovakian translation.
[00:25:20] Jan Almasy: It almost sounds like the blue-collar side of my family.
So half of them moved, and we're at the Republic Steel, and the other half were coal miners in West Virginia. And it sounds like part of the family is like, Oh, here come the Ciganyoks.
[00:25:32] David Kundtz: One of the things I want to mention is, the wonderful reception that we received in Medzev, Metzenseifen from the Flockbarts. These are really wonderful people. And, I think that Jan, do you know, is she still the mayor of Medzev?
[00:25:48] John Kundtz: I looked it up in preparation for this, and she was not reelected or didn't run, but there is a new mayor, I think, as of 2018, I believe.
[00:25:59] David Kundtz: Okay. That makes sense because she was mayor for a long time.
And Carl, they were just, we keep in touch every now and then by email. And, recently, when the Pope visited Slovakia, we had a couple of emails back and forth, and they're just wonderful people. And if anybody has a plan to visit, if any family members have a plan to visit Metzenseifen, be sure to get in touch, and I'll give you a contact for for the Flockbarts. They're wonderful.
[00:26:25] John Kundtz: I'm going to flash up a picture here. You hear you and Bob are in the, in her office. And I did a little research on those flags behind her. Cause I'm into flags. As you can see behind me, flags intrigue me. So obviously, 1 is the EU flag, right?
I'm guessing the 1 in the middle is the Slovak flag, and then the one on the right, behind her, is the Metzenseifen town of Metzenseifen flag.
[00:26:50] David Kundtz: I think that's right. Yeah, she was just charming, and she gave, I'd call it, a key to the city. It's just a minute. Can you see this? Oh, wow. It's a spike. It's a curve. It's a curved spike.
There's the handle. Obviously, it came out of the hammer.
And she presented it, I keep it right here on my desk. She presented it as a key to the city. And that in the picture, there, that plate with the orange cake?
It's got orange going through the middle. That's very typical, she said, of Metzenseifen, of Medzev. I tell you, they were so gracious. It's just hard to say. And then I also asked them, I said, with Bob and I visiting, I said, what's it like for gay people in Slovakia? And she said, Oh, it's totally cool. No problem at all. Part of that is because they're part of the European Union. And the other thing is that I think they're probably a lot more understanding than some of the people in that area. So I think it's still a little bit iffy over there for gay folks, but it's certainly getting much better.
[00:28:00] Jan Almasy: It definitely depends on what region, I would think it's similar to the way the US maybe lays itself out, that you get a little bit further into the, into the Carpathian Mountains, and it goes backward in times lately.
[00:28:11] David Kundtz: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true all over the world, isn't it?
[00:28:14] Jan Almasy: That is a really cool. That spike is awesome. I love how one thing that I've always loved about Slovak culture. And the only I always mess with my co-founder is Hardcore Italian. And I always mess with him, and I say the only people that might be able to outhost an Italian is a Slav. Because, when you show up, you would think, like, when I first came back, I didn't see my grandparents for five or six years because I was in the military.
And when I came back, you would have thought that the Messiah returned to Jdoba. We came back, and the neighbors were all waiting at my grandparent's house. We went down, and every single house had Kolachi and shots of Slivovitz. And by the time I made it back to my parents, er, back to my grandparent's house, I had no issues falling asleep.
Waking up the next morning, but. It has always inspired me, especially in business and entrepreneurship, where things can be fast-paced all the time. How gracious I am to be so closely connected to a culture that is so good at grounding themselves and just being in a moment with each other. It's beautiful.
[00:29:20] David Kundtz: Yeah, and that's so well said, and that totally was our experience there. That's why I keep emphasizing how embracing they were and how welcoming they were. One of the other things we did when we were there was visit our relatives, Kinga and her husband, Stefan. Kinga is related to the uncle that I mentioned, Uncle William, who was a priest, then married and had kids.
They live in the Buddha. Part of Budapest and we went there and had dinner with them, and they made us Hungarian goulash and they, the kids, were just wonderful and they gave us, we walked in the door, and they had glasses in the bottle of Shlevovitz. How do you say that?
Is that what it is? Of
[00:30:07] Jan Almasy: shlevovitz?
[00:30:08] David Kundtz: Shlevovitz. And of course, we drank it, but I don't, I hate that. But we drank it, and they were just so enthusiastic, and it was very warming. Very warming. They didn't have to do that for us. They didn't know us from heaven.
[00:30:28] Jan Almasy: I actually had a really, I had a really cool conversation with my grandfather when I was over there, and this may be something I'm really curious about two, two questions. And so I'll use this story to explain both. My grandfather was a steelworker who would have to travel back and forth to Russia because he was an engineer. And so he would work in the engineering plants.
We were sitting there having a conversation one night, bottling up some Slivovitz because he makes his at home, and I needed to bring some bottles back to the US. Otherwise, my mom would not invite me back into the home. But we had a really deep conversation about how he, I basically asked him, why are we...
It's like, why is it so important? You're teaching me all of these things about taking care of people. You're teaching me all of these things about making sure that you have gifts, making sure that you have good liquors, making sure that you have good food. Why is that such a large piece?
And he said that he proceeded to tell me stories about how he remembered after the war that Slovakia was left completely economically crippled and they were on the barter system. They had no currency. They had nothing. He was, if you didn't know how to make shoes, you didn't have shoes. If you didn't know how to raise a chicken to trade for a piece of clothing because you didn't know how to sew it was, so he said that the whole reason why he believes that the culture is still so prominently that way and they all care about each other so much is because it's not that long ago that the only way that you survived was on relationships with your neighbors.
[00:32:03] David Kundtz: So they have a deep appreciation.
[00:32:07] Jan Almasy: A very deep appreciation, and I've always taken that with me where it's maybe that's where a lot of that gratitude or that it's, maybe it's not gratitude. It's like vivaciousness for life. Life just invigorates them. And that, that, that comes from this deep appreciation for your neighbors.
And that value that community brings, and so that would be my two-part question is one, did you obviously experience that type of feeling in Medzev, but pretty much everywhere you went, would you say that was echoed? Yes. And then the second half I'm curious about because my dad is Roman Catholic and my mom is Byzantine, right?
Is there what was the religious context of Theodore and that part of the family as they came over? Are they Catholic or Orthodox, or what did that landscape look like?
[00:33:03] David Kundtz: That, the first part of the question is yes, I did encounter that same vivacity and just genuine welcome and appreciation based on memories of hard times.
And I'm also very grateful to have grown up in a family that exhibited that and found those same values.
[00:33:23] John Kundtz: Yeah, I would concur that value has gone through our families as long as I can remember.
[00:33:28] David Kundtz: Come in, you're welcome. Have a drink and make yourself at home.
In regard to religion, they were very definitely Roman Catholic. The family was very practicing very believing. And my aunts and uncles, even into their old age, were very practicing Catholics of all the children. However, it's interesting. I would say my father was probably the least dedicated Catholic.
He was, he was very definitely Roman Catholic and, but, had, He had an attitude that I've always appreciated, which was, take it too seriously, if you can get pretty severe, in religion can get pretty severe. So I always appreciated the edge he gave us about that.
My mother, on the other hand, was very; she had a heavy dose of Irish and German. from her family. So, she was also Catholic. But yeah, my father, probably the least gung ho, would you say in regard to that, but they were definitely Roman Catholic and practicing.
[00:34:32] John Kundtz: I noticed that growing up with all the relatives, my grandparents, your parents, you were the few people that were allowed to go to non-Catholic schools, right?
You guys were able to go to university school. We went to University School, and yeah. Where everybody of our, your generation, and pretty much my generation, had to go to a... Gilmore, Ignatius, or somewhere, right? They were definitely open to exploring, certainly from an educational perspective.
[00:35:00] David Kundtz: That was my dad. That was my dad much more than my mom. Yeah, for sure. I've always appreciated it. Yeah.
[00:35:07] John Kundtz: we should wrap this up. Unless you've got other questions, Jan or David, do you have anything else that you've covered? The things that I was curious about, I really was Okay. Wanted to explore this ethnic confusion that we kid ourselves.
[00:35:19] David Kundtz: I think we, I think we got the confusion.
[00:35:22] John Kundtz: You've definitely got Jan and I, putting on our bucket list. We're going over there one of these days.
[00:35:27] David Kundtz: Oh, I hope so. And be sure to look up the conditions I mentioned.
[00:35:33] John Kundtz: We will do that. And one last commercial. So this is really part one of an interview. Part two is going to be in a few weeks, where we're going to talk to David again under the disruptor mantra. And a little bit of a plug for the next one. In your new book, David, called “The Art of Stopping,” we're going to spend some time talking about how to survive disruption through the art of stopping. I think it'll be another great conversation in a couple of weeks.
[00:36:04] Jan Almasy: I'm definitely looking forward to that conversation as well. And you think about the way that we're wrapping this and the topic that we ended on was this, tenacity and vivaciousness towards life and grabbing it, those moments, as they, they fly away.
Like my grandmother always used to say that, Oh, what's the phrase? Bohas ha. Which basically means that the breath of God doesn't stay on earth for very long. That it's fleeting. It hits you, and then it runs away. And so that it's your job to be aware of when it enters and then be grateful for the fact that it's there.
And just be immersed in that moment to the point where she still sets an extra plate at the table for Jesus, and we're singing or, or we're, saying our prayers in Slovak, and there's that extra seat, but that. Familial bond is something that I was really intrigued to see if you guys both reflected on because that's when I was talking to my parents over the weekend.
That's what we all settled on: our favorite part about being Slovak is how tightly bonded. Our family is our family, so it's amazing to know that across generations, across different regions or ethnic confusions and whatever, that that region as a whole is just wholesome, to use the phrase that we used earlier, maybe a little bit peasant-like people that are just so deeply appreciative of the simple things. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what I'm really looking forward to exploring in the book, is maybe it's, I've read through, I believe it's a previous version that I have. But it's the one with the blue cover. And so I've, yeah, I read through that one, and I've gotten a lot of those types of mentalities coming through the words of the page.
Why it's so important to be able to stop, and it's been beautiful to have this conversation as a preface to this next one. So everybody that's listening, if you want, a little bit more in-depth on that type of concept and these pieces that will allow you to really grab a hold of those moments and appreciate life as you're moving through, especially now with how quickly everything seems to be moving. I highly recommend listening to the next episode.
[00:38:22] David Kundtz: Thank you so much—both of you.
Thank you, David. It's always good to chat with you. Thank you.
Anytime.
[00:38:30] Jan Almasy: Okay. All right. See you next time, everybody.