My Hijacking
A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Hodes (Mourning Lincoln) mixes memoir, psychology, and investigative reporting in this intimate account of the aftereffects of trauma. In September 1970, 12-year-old Hodes and her older sister, Catherine, were traveling unaccompanied from Tel Aviv to New York City when their plane and two others were hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and forced to land in the Jordanian desert. Hodes remembers little of the seven-day ordeal ("When I thought about landing in the desert, I saw hazy pictures and heard faint voices," she writes) and eventually discovers that she and other passengers were drugged—the International Red Cross, brought in to help negotiate with the hijackers and care for the hostages, provided tranquilizers to help passengers cope with the stress of captivity. Afterward, Hodes's parents made little effort to further discuss the event, and it would be years before posttraumatic stress disorder became widely understood and therapy was prescribed for victims of terrorism. Hodes also delves into the frenzied reporting on the hijacking, noting that a widely circulated story that one of the hostages gave birth was false. Ultimately, she concludes that by encouraging her and her sister to forget about the hijacking, the adults in their lives contributed to their struggles "as grown-ups to maintain the intimacy that helped us survive back then." It's a poignant and perceptive study of what it takes to heal. Photos. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified the origin point of the author's flight.
