Montreal seeks Cohen tribute
City’s devoted fans mull over how best to honour an artist who helped put it on the map
MONTREAL— For the longest time, a ramshackle gazebo at the foot of Montreal’s iconic mountain was this city’s official tribute to its bestknown writer, Mordechai Richler.
This summer, a construction nightmare had Montrealers cursing all along the slow-moving gauntlet of traffic cones named for René Lévesque, Quebec’s much-respected sovereigntist premier.
And a child sex-abuse scandal recently forced officials to rename a city park and remove a sculpture honouring filmmaker Claude Jutra.
So how will Montreal pay tribute to its deceased poet laureate, Leonard Cohen, the man who helped put the city on the map?
Not a day has passed since his death was announced to the public, but already there are as many suggestions as songs in his long body of work.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, who was in Jerusalem when the news emerged, wrote on Twitter Thursday night that the city would honour one of its best-known citizens, one of the few who was able to straddle the city’s linguistic divide.
Coderre wrote that, in the meantime, “I will profit from my voyage to say a prayer for Monsieur Cohen at the Wailing Wall and bring back a rock from Jerusalem out of respect.”
Outside Cohen’s Montreal home, which overlooks a small park and is several strides from the city’s main street, Saint-Laurent Boulevard, fans contributed flowers, photographs, fedoras, candles, cards, cas- settes and even a Montreal bagel to a makeshift memorial.
One of his more devoted fans, Natasha Nuhanovic, had been there since 11:30 p.m. Thursday and, with a friend, had taken it upon herself to keep Cohen’s music playing in a JVC Stereophonic Sound System that probably dates to the release of Cohen’s Recent Songs album in 1979.
In the early hours of Friday morning, once the television cameras had disappeared, the crowd grew more intimate, Nuhanovic said. People began sharing stories about the memories and experiences for which his songs and poems served as the soundtrack or provided spiritual guidance.
Lillian Sveen, who was visiting Montreal from Edmonton, said she was introduced to Cohen’s poetry by her older sisters and remembered his performances being broadcast on the CBC as a child.
Her friend, Lydia Cotsapas, grew enamoured with Cohen after studying the lyrics to “Suzanne” in a university English literature class. The first dance at her wedding was to Cohen’s1986 song “Take This Waltz.” The women were among dozens of people who arrived in small waves on their way to the office, or classes or other appointments in their lives Friday morning.
“This is exactly what he would want. People talking and coming together,” Nuhanovic said. The challenge for the city of Cohen’s birth is how to keep that spirit alive. “It’s a good question that we’re all kind of thinking about. It’s on my mind, too. I’m struggling to come up with an answer for it,” said Zev Moses, executive director of the Museum of Jewish Montreal.
For Montreal Jews, Cohen was a figure who challenged its religious traditions, but went on to become a source of pride, giving other Jews a sense that they were “cool,” Moses said.
“What do you even say about this giant and what he meant for the Jewish community, to the country and to so many people around the world?”
The easy answer would be to rename a park or a street in Cohen’s honour.
When Vincent Marissal, a columnist for Montreal newspaper La Presse, threw the question out on Twitter, there was a deluge of responses about the best way to honour Cohen.
A number of people suggested renaming the park right in front of Cohen’s downtown home in his honour. Since 1975, it’s been know as Parc de Portugal, in honour of the wave of Portuguese immigrants who settled in the city in the mid-1950s.
There are precedents and there are pitfalls, but no easy way to determine what best suits an artist of Cohen’s stature.
“A park? A concert hall? I’m not sure,” said Moses, the museum director. “He’s such a low-key guy that it seems like the most appropriate thing for him would be something that gives you the same feeling as gathering in an apartment with friends and playing music together, or something like that.”