My friend, Stephen Schwartz, sends this note from Kosovo:

Although now independent, the republic of Kosovo remains subject to United Nations jurisdiction, regarding, among other issues, protection of the Serbian minority in the territory. UN policies on the Kosovo Serb minority have become inseparable from the political metastasis of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Serbian Orthodox religious leaders promoted violent ultranationalism during the recent Balkan wars, and in Kosovo they now anticipate that the church will become the sole foundation of Kosovo Serbian communal identity. In the constellation of Serbian enclaves designated by the UN or demanded by the Serbs in Kosovo, many are structured around church properties. In some cases UN schemes provide for state and other public assets to be annexed to ownership by the Serbian church for inclusion in the new protected zones.

The historic and beautiful Kosovar city of Prizren offers disturbing indicators of how this policy may go wrong. Prizren is the offical center for the Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo, but is also the Kosovo seat of the Albanian Catholic church, headed by archbishop Dodë Gjergji. Further, Prizren includes the headquarters of the Sunni Muslim Sufi orders in Kosovo, and the city’s chief imam, Ali Vezaj, is an outspoken Muslim moderate.

Several Serbian Orthodox churches in Prizren have been designated as special protected zones, with the intention of annexing their surroundings. This will likely result in the removal of Albanian shops and houses near the churches, as well as the possible closure of the city’s main square. Additionally, the present plan for special Orthodox church-centered areas in Prizren would involve usurpation of paleo-Christian sites. One major complex includes the Monastery of the Archangels, which was built by the 14th century Serbian ruler Tsar Dushan on the foundations of a paleo-Christian church. On the hill above it stands the “Castle of the Maiden,” which includes the foundations of another paleo-Christian church, dedicated to St. Nicholas.

In a recent visit, I was informed that foreigners supervising the rehabilitation of Serbian Orthodox churches in Prizren (some of which were damaged in inter-ethnic fighting in 2004) have ordered that the pre-Orthodox archeological remnants discovered during reconstruction should be covered with concrete. Albanian Catholic representatives in Kosovo believe they, like their Sufi and other Muslim colleagues in Prizren, will be allowed no voice in determining the future of the city’s multifaith heritage, marked for sacrifice to ethnic separation in the name of peace.

Masab Youssef, the 30-year-old son of a top Hamas operative in the West Bank, spoke to Ha’aretz today about his conversion to Christianity, his respect for Israel, and his conviction that political organizations guided by Islam never will make peace with the Jewish State. Masab’s interview with Avi Issacharoff appears in today’s edition of the Israeli newspaper’s weekend magazine .

Masab, who now is known as Joseph, was until recently a Hamas operative working for his father Sheikh Hassan Yousef, whom Ha’aretz calls “the most popular figure in that extremist Islamic organization in the West Bank.” In the interview he describes how he became a Christian and warns Israelis against any illusions of peace with Hamas:

You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death. They have to take revenge against anyone who did not agree to accept the Prophet Mohammed, like the Jews who are seen in the Koran as monkeys and the sons of pigs. They speak in terms of historical rights that were taken from them. In the view of Hamas, peace with Israel contradicts sharia and the Koran, and the Jews have no right to remain in Palestine.

Some extracts from the interview:

As a child I grew up in a very religious family, on the principle of hatred of Israelis. The first time I encountered them was at about the age of 10, when soldiers entered our home and arrested my father. Until then I had never been separated from him. We didn’t know anything about the circumstances of his arrest. His membership in Hamas was a secret matter, and we certainly didn’t think he was one of its founders. I didn’t understand anything about politics or religion. I only knew that the Israeli army had arrested my father repeatedly, and for me he was everything: a good, loving man who would do anything for me. He took care of us, bought us gifts, gave of himself, whereas the soldiers entered our house and took him away from me. In high school I studied sharia, Islamic law. In 1996, when I was only 18, I was arrested by the Israel Defense Forces because I was the head of the Islamic Society in my high school. It’s a kind of youth movement of the organization. And my process of awakening began.

How were you exposed to Christianity?

It began about eight years ago. I was in Jerusalem and I received an invitation to come and hear about Christianity. Out of curiosity I went. I was very enthusiastic about what I heard. I began to read the Bible every day and I continued with religion lessons. I did it in secret, of course. I used to travel to the Ramallah hills, to places like the Al Tira neighborhood, and to sit there quietly with the amazing landscape and read the Bible. A verse like “Love thine enemy” had a great influence on me. At this stage I was still a Muslim and I thought that I would remain one. But every day I saw the terrible things done in the name of religion by those who considered themselves ‘great believers.’ I studied Islam more thoroughly and found no answers there. I reexamined the Koran and the principals of the faith and found how it is mistaken and misleading. The Muslims borrowed rituals and traditions from all the surrounding religions.

Andrey Rublev, an early fifteenth-century monk in Moscow, is considered by many to be the best Russian icon painter. His work was recently pointed out to me by a young Hungarian woman, who has spent a good bit of time in Russia. Kati writes: “I cannot tell how and why, but somehow it is clear that the person who painted these loved God very much. What is very interesting for me is the corners of the Trinity-members’ mouths; I haven’t often seen a loving smile without mannerism in paintings. . . . These icons somehow enchant you and do not let you go, when you see them real. The Savior is not a beautiful painting in the general sense, but you feel his eyes on you.”

Images of images: Even in pixilated, thumbnail form, the mystical beauty of the icons—once praising God in cathedrals and monasteries, now ornamenting gallery walls—filters through. But what a shabby filter: The 600-year-old originals, Kati notes, speak with gently haunting tones that can scarcely be captured by the fanciest LCD technology. And yet the most masterful icon is but an image—a shabby image of the One who made both paint and painter. How much greater, I wonder, is this gap of imaging? How much more beautiful is He face to face?

Today’s New York Sun reviews a fascinating book by Tim Tzouliadis that catalogs some of the forgotten casualties of the Communism. (I found the review on Arts & Letters Daily.) The Forsaken tells the story of Americans who moved to the USSR to help complete the “building of socialism:”

Lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, [they] migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the “building of socialism.” It was, in the words of the author, “the least heralded migration in American history” and a period when “for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving.” Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.

As I read this review, it occurred to me that my generation especially needs, and does not often get, frequent reminders of the rampant evils of communism. Our earliest political memories are of the election of George H. W. Bush and the first Gulf War, with maybe only an inkling from our parents that something called the Berlin Wall fell.

By and large, we have no first-hand knowledge of what life was like with communism looming large on the horizon. The little secondhand information we receive tends to emphasize the diplomatic chess game between the USSR and the US and America’s failures in Vietnam. Communism is not seen as the kind of evil that Nazism was. We are repeatedly taught “Never again” when it comes to Hitler’s genocide, yet communism’s greater slaughters do not attain the same level of evil.

Books like The Forsaken, therefore, are important because they remind us once more of just how failed, twisted, and evil an experiment communism was. And those of us who do not remember it firsthand need all the reminding we can get.

The old C.C.C. buildings from the 1930s are more than a little run down,

but they are what gives the place its tone and shape—at least, as I remember the Black Hills Playhouse when I was young.

A sort of summer stock theater, run out of the University of South Dakota’s theater department all the way across the state in Vermillion, the playhouse was established in 1946 when a drama professor named Warren M. Lee took over an abandoned C.C.C. camp in Custer State Park and started putting on plays for tourists and the handful of nearby residents.

My sisters and I spent the summer there, the year that I was ten, acting in such plays as Carousel and Dr. Lee’s own South Dakota melodrama, The Legend of Devil’s Gulch. A fun time, in memory, and enough to draw me back last night, driving up with my family from our summer stay in Hot Springs to see one of the performances. The seats are softer, and there’s air conditioning now, but the canteen looks much the same at intermission:

And in the backstage world of summer stock, there are some things that never change:

Is the captivation of such places only the spell of memory? The eternal question of the memoirist: Did you have to have been there to want to go back?