Publishers Weekly
04/24/2023
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. (June)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified the origin point of the author's flight.
From the Publisher
Intriguing. . . . What gives her book its propulsive force [is] her effort not only to piece together the details of the hijacking and its aftermath, but to make sense of the omissions in her own memory. . . . Hodes examines the episode with a historian’s meticulousness and a reporter’s zeal.” — New York Times
“In reclaiming her personal history, Ms. Hodes has provided a lesson for us all in the power of memory both to conceal and heal.” — Wall Street Journal
"In this singular and riveting book, Martha Hodes uses her considerable skills as a prize-winning historian to reconstruct her own experiences as a young girl aboard a hijacked plane in the Jordan desert in 1970. Taking multiple paths into the question of why she remembered so little of what she lived and felt during that traumatic event, Hodes has given us a moving and unforgettable meditation not just on history and memory, but also on family and the silences they guard." — Ada Ferrer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History
"Everything about this story is a surprise and it is told by one of the most fascinating, imaginative scholars now at work in American history." — Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan
"A poignant and perceptive study of what it takes to heal." — Publishers Weekly
"My Hijacking is a historian’s riveting account of having been, as a child, made an unwilling participant in a historic event. A skillful combination of memoir and history, Hodes’s talents as a historian and writer are on full display in this beautifully written and deeply affecting work." — Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Times bestselling author of On Juneteenth
"Martha Hodes is one of the best writers in the profession of American historians. In this book she transcends the art of history as she also practices it, crafting a memoir of gripping power and courage about her "voyage into forgetting and remembering". Hodes delivers something sacred - a heroic search to "unbury" a terrible piece of her own past in records, but especially in her disconnected memory. She creates her own genre - a devotional narrative about the mystery of memory and truth, accomplished with humility and intrepid determination. [An] unforgettable book." — David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
"Revolutionary, revelatory, and deeply moving, My Hijacking starts where other memoirs stop—at the absolute limits of memory. A terrific work of suspense and a magnificent achievement that sets a new benchmark for the genre." — Nell Zink, author of Avalon
"An extraordinary task . . . . Hodes calls the book a 'personal history' rather than a memoir, and that is apt. If memoir brings the devices of fiction to the task of autobiography, then Hodes has brought the instruments and procedures of historical biography to her own personal narrative. [Hodes] demonstrates a keen and subtle eye.” — New Republic
"My Hijacking is a tremendous account of an event now widely forgotten, and would be valuable enough for that. It is even more a fascinating meditation on what and why people remember – and what and why they forget." — New Humanist
Kirkus Reviews
2023-04-08
A historian reckons with her own experience of a world-historical event.
As a professor of history at NYU and award-winning author of Mourning Lincoln and The Sea Captain’s Wife, Hodes has made a career out of examining the past. Here, she uses the tools of her trade to reconstruct an event from her childhood. In September 1970, 12-year-old Hodes and her 14-year-old sister, Catherine, were flying home to New York after spending the summer with their mother in Israel. Midflight, members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine took control of the plane and forced the pilot to land in the desert in Jordan. Hodes spent the next week wondering about her fate—and the next 45 years trying to forget the experience. This book records her attempt to know what she couldn’t remember and understand the global politics at play, which she could not fully comprehend as a child. Her search took her from her father’s storage unit to the State Historical Society of Missouri, where the airline’s archives are located and to the desert where she was held hostage. As she read an old diary, Hodes discovers that she was erasing the worst parts of her experience even as they were happening. At the Swiss headquarters of the International Red Cross, she discovered a message her father wrote for her and Catherine that was never delivered, but most of the recollections she sought remained submerged. Eschewing a linear narrative, Hodes revisits the same events multiple times, as if another trip back to a particular moment will prove illuminating. The fact that such revelations fail to appear makes the narrative feel repetitious and sometimes superficial. The book is most interesting when the author writes candidly about the psychic burden of staying silent and the difficulty of excavating long-buried memories.
In a mixed-success attempt to understand her past, Hodes unearths trauma and contends with its aftermath.
