Victims advocate returns to Stanwood Library, where he once found refuge
Published 8:54 pm Friday, June 26, 2015
STANWOOD — For Joshua Safran, the library here was more than a place to check out books. It was a refuge from the chaos of his off-the-grid upbringing and where he first found God.
The now nationally recognized author, attorney and advocate for victims of domestic violence returned this week to the place where as a boy he found shelter and his Jewish identity.
He signed copies of his memoir, “Free Spirit: Growing Up on the Road and Off the Grid,” at the Stanwood Library on Thursday evening. Safran, 39, read from his book before a crowd that included many of the local people featured in it.
The memoir details his childhood, which he spent wandering alongside his idealistic mother, Claudia Reed, as she searched for a counterculture utopia. When he was 9, she left a Haight-Ashbury commune of pagan witches in hopes of joining a community she’d heard about in Skagit County.
They hitchhiked north, living along the way in makeshift homes, including tents, shacks fashioned from wooden crates and cardboard, communes, cults, buses and even an ice-cream truck.
They ended up in Stanwood after his mother met and married a refugee of the Salvadoran civil war. He turned out to be a violent drunk who beat Reed and eventually raised his fist to Safran, too.
Safran found solace and so much more at the library.
He’d first learned of his Jewish roots when a man told his mother that her kid had the “nose of a rabbi.” He asked her what it meant to be Jewish. She said she didn’t really know so they’d have to look it up at the library.
Safran made his way to Dewey Decimal System number 296. Judaism.
He started reading through the texts.
“My whole life, we didn’t belong anywhere and suddenly I had this sense of belonging,” he said in an interview Thursday. “This library was like my Jerusalem.”
Safran, who previously had no formal education due to his mother’s beliefs, decided he wanted to go to Stanwood Middle School. But, in tattered shirts and patched paisley pants, he had trouble fitting in.
His struggles at school and at home left him with a deeper connection to the stories in Jewish history of a wayfaring people who felt as if they didn’t belong anywhere. In Stanwood, Safran said, he often felt like an outcast in a mostly Evangelical Christian community.
Eventually, his mother decided to break free of her abusive marriage. With the help of friends and strangers, she and Safran escaped to a community on Walker Valley Road in Skagit County.
Safran went on to land a full-ride scholarship to Oberlin College in Ohio and studied abroad in Israel.
“I went because as a Stanwood Library Jew, I wanted to see what it was all about,” he said. “I found a country of people like me. No one had been very welcomed by their community.”
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase that suggests it is the shared responsibility of humanity to repair or heal the world, resonated with Safran. He decided to return home to help fix things for his mother.
He worked as a janitor through law school at the University of California Berkeley, and was hired straight out of school at a powerful corporate law firm. It wasn’t long before he started to feel that his work wasn’t making a difference, he said.
That led to him taking a pro-bono case. Safran worked to free Deborah Peagler,a victim of domestic violence, who had served more than a quarter century in prison for her connection with her abuser’s murder. She said her abuser had forced her into prostitution, beat her with a bullwhip and molested her daughters.
The story of her case was featured in the award-winning documentary film “Crime After Crime.”
Safran said he bonded with Peagler after they realized they both found it strange that their abusers would put raw meat on the wounds they inflicted, to control the swelling.
Despite a seven-year legal battle with one roadblock after another, Safran said, the heartbreaking case didn’t challenge his faith until Peagler was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“And there was Debbie, inspiring me. She said, ‘my story is better now that I’m dying. It’s not about me anymore,’” Safran recalled. “She was really talking about the tikkun we could make.”
Peagler was free for 10 months before she died in 2010. Safran continues to tell her story, advocating for survivors of domestic violence at schools and community centers across the country. It was Peagler who motivated him to share his experiences with alcoholism and abuse in his memoir.
“If that saves another woman’s life or many women’s lives, it’s worth it,” Safran said.
On the paperwork for his most recent talk in Stanwood on Thursday, Safran waived all speaking fees for services the community rendered 30 years ago. Shannon Kirby, whose mother, Tammy Kirby, helped Safran and his mother escape the abuse, attended. She said she was impressed with what Safran had made of his childhood.
“He’s a force for positivity now,” said Kirby, of Camano Island.
Rose King, the sixth-grade teacher who helped Safran catch up when he started school, echoed a similar sentiment.
“The message is no matter what your life is, you can make something of it,” King said.
Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com.
