My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering

In this moving and thought-provoking memoir, a historian offers a personal look at the fallibilities of memory and the lingering impact of trauma as she goes back fifty years to tell the story of being a passenger on an airliner hijacked in 1970.

On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Martha Hodes and her thirteen-year-old sister were flying unaccompanied back to New York City from Israel when their plane was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and forced to land in the Jordan desert. Too young to understand the sheer gravity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Martha coped by suppressing her fear and anxiety. Nearly a half-century later, her memories of those six days and nights as a hostage are hazy and scattered. Was it the passage of so much time, or that her family couldn’t endure the full story, or had trauma made her repress such an intense life-and-death experience? A professional historian, Martha wanted to find out.

Drawing on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages, Martha Hodes sets out to re-create what happened to her, and what it was like for those at home desperately hoping for her return. Thrown together inside a stifling jetliner, the hostages forged friendships, provoked conflicts, and dreamed up distractions. Learning about the lives and causes of their captors—some of them kind, some frightening—the sisters pondered a deadly divide that continues today. 

A thrilling tale of fear, denial, and empathy, My Hijacking sheds light on the hostage crisis that shocked the world, as the author comes to a deeper understanding of both what happened in the Jordan desert in 1970 and her own fractured family and childhood sorrows.

How does a historian piece together a past her own mind has tried to erase?

• The Fragility of Memory: Fifty years later, the author confronts the gaps in her own recollection, questioning whether time, family silence, or trauma itself is the reason her memory of six days as a hostage is so scattered.
• A World-Shaking Historical Event: An intimate, child’s-eye view of the 1970 hostage crisis in the Jordan desert, as an unaccompanied twelve-year-old tries to make sense of her Palestinian captors and the deadly geopolitical conflict surrounding her.
• Deep Archival Research: The professional historian meticulously pieces together the past using her own childhood diary, declassified documents, and recent interviews with fellow hostages to uncover the full story.
• A Fractured Family History: Beyond the hijacking, this is a poignant exploration of a childhood split between two continents and the unspoken sorrows that shaped a family long before the crisis began.

Martha Hodes is professor of history at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning books Mourning Lincoln; The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. She has presented her scholarship around the world and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.