Late in the afternoon, over Memorial Day weekend, 1987, West Point cadet Carr Kizzier picked up the phone to call his father.

He hadn’t yet made the decision that would both radically change the direction of his life and forever alter the relationship with the man who used to pick him up on weekends so the two could buddy up on the couch and watch classic war movies, or build vintage model fighter planes.

Almost a year earlier, right before he was scheduled to report for plebe summer, ripe from a week-long, high school graduation blow-out with friends in Puerta Vallarta, he’d met his father in New York City and they drove the 60 miles to the United States Military Academy on the west bank of the Hudson River.

“I didn’t realize how scared I was,” Kizzier said of his first day. “I was psyched, but I couldn’t eat for a couple days. My nerves were shot. I was terrified. When you’re inducted, you have these scary dudes yelling in your face. It’s humiliating, it’s supposed to be. They strip you down and they give you this gym uniform, with knee-high black dress socks and black dress shoes. By the end of the day, they want you to march around the parade ground in front of your parents, who just dropped you off. They’re trying to strip you of your identity.”

With all the animated films that come out these days, it can actually be somewhat difficult to distinguish a Disney-made one from the others, seeing as how the competition tries on a consistent basis to copy the style that Walt Disney himself unofficially trademarked as far back as the late 1920s. The very thought that something is being put out by Disney can lead to biased appeal. In 1994, Warner Bros. had produced an animated feature entitled Thumbelina. In one of its first test screenings, the overall audience consensus was low, discouraging the executives because they felt theirs was as fine a product as their competition. In an unprecedented move, Warner Bros. stripped their logo from the film’s opening and replaced it with the Disney one. The next test screening results were up (Schweizer, Schweizer 135).

There is something about a Disney animated film that causes people to set out to movie theaters en masse each and every time a new one is released. Some would say that the reason behind this is that Disney just keeps putting out one hit after another and audiences expect perfection each time. Unfortunately, for the company that has made Mickey Mouse a household name for over 90 years, that isn’t the case. Even though people are showing up to the cinemas, they aren’t doing it because they expect to see a screen gem. They’re doing it because it’s felt that they owe something, possibly their childhood, to Disney. But, does that mean people are being foolish for constantly shelling out money to see a Disney animated film every year or so? The answer is ‘no,’ because Disney was able to gain such an early monopoly on the industry that it allowed them to prevent the growth and maturation of animation and the American people’s taste for it. Stagnation occurred; so, when the history behind Disney’s success is examined, it can be seen that the quality of its pictures failed to stop evolving much earlier than most think, allowing the animation within its own walls, and those of its rivals, to stop growing, causing the average American the inability to view the medium as anything more than something made for children.

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I grew up with the sounds of German/Yidddish accented English. We children of Holocaust survivors, often referred to as “second generation survivors,” were usually amused and frequently embarrassed by the foreignness of survivors as they translated German sentence structure into English structure. I remember hearing my mother talking on the phone to a friend from her same small, rural town, speaking half sentences in her regional, Mannheim German dialect, but finishing a sentence in perfect English.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Washington Heights, the home to the largest number of German/Jewish Holocaust survivors in America. Nearly thirty thousand German Jews settled here during and after the Holocaust creating a unique community where they preserved their Jewish identity, while at the same time feeling grateful to call themselves Americans. My parents were among them. They were not orthodox Jews in a neighborhood of many observant Jews; I would watch them, and “being a real American teenager,” I saw them as Jews who were out of touch with the real world. Those orthodox German Jews seemed to have transported with them religious customs and rituals of a time when Jews lived in isolated ghettos. At the same time, I was acutely aware that it was their (our) Jewishness which marked them/us in Nazi occupied Europe as enemies. I became sadly aware of this quite often in the neighborhood, in a subway or bus, I noticed the tattooed numbers of an Auschwitz survivor on their arm. When quite young, I would hear the whispered voice of my mother, “don’t stare.”

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