Leah Harris, who was highlighted in THE S WORD, is featured in this month’s Passengers Journal with her story “Built to Last.”
Passengers Journal is an online and fully-voiced literary and visual arts publication that seeks artists whose work challenges and perhaps offends the norms of our structurally oppressive society.
Below is the introduction and you can read the full story on the Passengers Journal website which also features an audio recording.
I bought my first pair of Doc Marten boots in 1990, with money I saved up from babysitting the local Orthodox rabbi’s children. Standing in the footwear section of The Black, a cluttered alternative shop in Ocean Beach, I was at first overwhelmed by the array of Docs in all heights and colors. But as soon as I glimpsed them on the shelf, I knew I’d found my talismans. Eight-holed. Oxblood. Steel-toed. Fuck. Yes.
Their dried-blood hue and their signature yellow stitching mesmerized my fifteen-year-old self. The bite of their new leather scent intoxicated me. I turned them around, marveling at their heft, admiring their every detail, down to the black and yellow AirWair tag flapping from the back of each boot. When I strapped them on, their bouncing soles became twin life-rafts for navigating the turbulent rapids of my adolescence.
If the rabbi, his wife, or my Jewish family had known the truth of their origins, they would have never approved of me wearing boots designed by Klaus Märtens, a Nazi doctor in the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces. When Märtens began manufacturing his shoes in the 1950s, he fashioned the original bouncing soles from surplus Luftwaffe rubber. Most American Jews, including my own family, continued to boycott German products long after World War II was over.
Continue reading “Built to Last” on Passengers Journal.
