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March 30, 2001/Nisan 6, 5761, Vol. 53, No.26
'Kate Brasher' creator inspired by Jewish themes
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
Stephen Tolkin was sitting at his desk, surrounded by Bibles, recounting how Rabbi Mark Borovitz became the inspiration for the leading male character on his spiritually themed CBS series, "Kate Brasher."
About six years ago, he met Borovitz at the Shabbat dinner table at the Los Angeles home of his brother, writer-director Michael Tolkin ("The Player," "The Rapture"). He was immediately taken with the charismatic spiritual leader of Gateways Beit T'Shuvah, a residential treatment center for Jews in recovery from alcohol and drug addiction.
A few years later, he turned to Borovitz for counseling after a friend descended into substance abuse. "He was like a sage, a tzaddik," Tolkin recalled. "But his advice was very practical." When the writer-director created "Kate Brasher," about a struggling single mother (Mary Stuart Masterson) who goes to work for a community advocacy center, he used Borovitz as the model for the center's founder, Joe Almeida (Hector Elizondo). In the series, we learn that Almeida created the organization while rebuilding his life after his teenage daughter was killed in gang crossfire. Borovitz, an ex-convict and alcoholic, also vanquished his demons and co-founded a center to help others conquer overwhelming odds in their lives.
"Both Joe and Mark founded a tabernacle," said Tolkin, 47, who now attends High Holiday services. "They made a temple of light in the darkness. And they both did it out of their own suffering."
Unlike Borovitz, the fictional Almeida refuses to believe in God, insisting that the senseless acts of violence he has witnessed are the products of "a random universe ... balls at the billiard table, hitting and missing."
He heatedly argues with the devout Brasher, whose eclectic spirituality leads her to draw upon sources as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran.
Though the character of Kate, like Masterson, is non-Jewish, she shares Tolkin's sentiment that the universe will provide - if you work at it.
"Existence is a partnership between God and man," Tolkin says. "This is evident on Friday nights, when we bless wine, not grapes, and bread, not wheat - all products of the collaboration between God and man."
Tolkin grew up in a Reform Jewish household in a show business family. His mother, Edith, was senior vice president of legal affairs at Paramount, while his father, Mel, was a television comedy writer for programs such as "All in the Family" and Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows."
Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and other Caesar scribes were guests in the Tolkin home. "I recall, as a young child, sitting in the writer's room at 'The Caesar Hour' in New York and people smoking and yelling and throwing Yiddish around and carrying on," he says. "It was very Jewish."
In 1961, the Tolkins followed the television industry migration west and relocated to Beverly Hills, a confusing time for 7-year-old Stephen. "My parents and all their friends moved to California at the same time, and I didn't understand why all the same people were still around us, with all the same furniture in their homes," he said.
By the late 1970s, Tolkin was writing a script with Michael by night while utilizing his Yale master's degree to support himself as an architect by day. The script earned the brothers a TV editing job, though they parted ways professionally after a couple of years. "Our stuff wasn't getting made, and it took a toll on our partnership," explains Tolkin, who by the 1990s was making inroads on the TV movie circuit. Michael, meanwhile, was receiving wide acclaim as the author of a novel and a film called "The Player," a scathing Hollywood satire about a studio executive who murders a writer and gets away with it.
Tolkin, who found the Reform Judaism of his youth to be "despiritualized and empty," felt differently after his daughter, Theadora, entered religious school at Temple Israel of Hollywood in 1990. "I began listening to the prayers," he said. "I attended a Torah class with the rabbi. I started to think about the application of Torah to everyday life."
"Kate Brasher" airs 8 p.m. Saturdays on CBS.
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