MY HIJACKING

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.