Mordecai Richler was an award winning, world renowned author and essayist.
Two of his classic novels, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney’s Version, which were both set in Montreal were transformed into hit feature films. Honoured internationally, he was however an extremely controversial figure in his home province of Quebec, and city of Montreal.
Richler, an Anglophone Jew, loved the place with its mix of language and culture, but had no love for the Francophone Quebec separatist movement.
Using his rapier wit he often skewered them in essays and newspaper columns. In return, various separatist groups mounted a long, concerted, and often distorted campaign against him, such that most Francophone Quebeckers remain convinced he was “anti-Quebec” and against Francophone Quebeckers in general.
Thus, even though internationally known, honoured, and respected, when Richler died at age 70 back in 2001, a huge debate raged about how his native city should honour him. Unlike Gaston Miron, a very talented, provincially-known poet and Quebec nationalist who died in 1996, there would be no “state funeral” for Richler.
Even re-naming a street was too politically sensitive and so how to commemorate him remained a delicate topic to be left on the back burner for years.
Eventually in 2011, it was decided to dedicate a dilapidated bandstand in Mount Royal Park to him. The gazebo, unmaintained for decades, would of course be restored. Nonetheless, many of his fans saw this as a deliberate insult.
Eventually, years later, in 2015, a public library was re-named in his honour.
However, the Mordecai Richler gazebo, is still on the books, and still dilapidated.
Contacted by CBC, the current mayor of the city, Denis Coderre, declined an interview, but his office says there has been another slight delay, but that the mayor is following the situation and repairs will be done. Coderre himself tweeted late Tuesday that the issue may come up at today’s executive committee meeting.
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