Voices From the Past in a Frank Exchange of Letters

--The letters were typical of those that schoolgirls wrote to their pen pals. But the time was 1940, and two of the schoolgirls were 11-year-old Anne Frank and her 14-year-old sister Margot. The two letters, a postcard and two photographs of the Jewish sisters are dated a month before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and the Frank family was forced into hiding. The New York Times reported that the items have been put up for auction by Betty Jean Wagner of Danville, Iowa, who, with her sister Juanita, started the correspondence with the Frank sisters at the suggestion of a teacher. The letters, to be auctioned by Swann Galleries in Manhattan on Oct. 25, expressed little of the world about to explode around them. “I am sitting in the fifth class,” Anne wrote. “ . . . We may do what we may prefer, of course we must get to a certain goal. . . .”

--The wife of exiled Soviet novelist Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn has emphatically denied reports that Kremlin officials have invited her husband to return to his homeland or have opened negotiations with him about publishing his banned works. “Someone is playing a game on us,” said Natalya Solzhenitsyn from their home near Cavendish, Vt., where she and her Nobel Prize-winning husband have lived since 1976. Solzhenitzyn, who will be 70 in December, was exiled in 1974 after publication in the West of “The Gulag Archipelago,” which chronicles the prison camps, or “gulags,” which he said stretched like a hidden chain of islands across the Soviet Union. Although Soviet authorities are now rewriting official histories to acknowledge, for the first time, the millions of people who suffered and died under Kremlin dictator Josef Stalin, Solzhenitsyn’s works are still banned, in part because he was harshly critical of Vladimir Lenin, revered as the founder of the Soviet state.

--Former astronaut Sally K. Ride and poet Gwendolyn Brooks have been selected for induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y. They will join 40 other American women who were chosen because they were outstanding in their field and overcame adversity to attain success. Ride, 37, a Los Angeles native, became the first American woman in space in 1983 when she flew in the space shuttle Challenger. She now teaches at Stanford University. Brooks, 71, of Chicago, was the first black woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for her second volume of poetry called “Annie Allen.” She won the honor in 1950.