My Hijacking

Half a century after the fact, historian Martha Hodes looks back at her own childhood and asks how reliable her memories are and how much fear a person can bury over the years. On September 6, 1970, Martha, who was twelve, and her thirteen-year-old sister were traveling alone from Israel to New York City when members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine seized their plane and forced it down in the desert of Jordan.

Too young to grasp the weight of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Martha got through the ordeal by holding her fear and worry at bay. Decades later, her recollections of the six days and nights she spent as a hostage are fragmented. Was the time gone by to blame, had her family been unable to hear the whole story, or had trauma pushed the experience out of reach? Trained as a historian, she set out to find the answer. Drawing on extensive archival research, her own childhood recollections, and interviews with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages, she reconstructs both her experience and the anxious wait of those at home hoping for the hostages' safe return.

Crammed into a sweltering airliner, the hostages formed friendships, argued, and invented ways to pass the time. The sisters learned about the lives and motives of their captors, some of whom were gentle and others menacing, and reflected on a deadly rift that persists today. The book examines the hijacking crisis that horrified the world and, alongside it, the author's growing understanding of the events in the Jordanian desert and of her own strained family and the sorrows of her childhood.