[powerpress]
Today’s Kaddish is for the ninety-two and counting killed by a Christian fundamentalist in Norway on Friday.
At the end of Kogan’s “Kaddish” you hear five of me playing the Norwegian national anthem, “Ja, vi elsker dette landet,” thanks to the wonder of multi-track recording.
I thought of adding “Ja, vi elsker” mainly because I know the song, as a good Norwegian-American citizen who went to the most Norwegian of Norwegian-American schools, St Olaf College. It’s a good tune. But while laying down these tracks, it occurred to me that it’s perfectly in keeping with Kaddish’s history—as Mira pointed out in her essay that sparked this whole “kaddish in two-part harmony” project, saying Kaddish was a nationalist act of defiance during a period of pogromic annihilation.
Nice touch with “Ja vi elsker.” Most national anthems are probably best played byt a band, and that turned out to be a pretty good one-person band.
Mange takk! It’s a pretty good national anthem, too—until you read the full text of the poem. Uff da. Just another militaristic disaster area of jingoism, even from the nice Nordics.