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Published by HarperCollins

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—and a hostage—on a hijacked airliner.

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, she 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. Drawing on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages, Martha sets out to re-create what happened to her. Learning about the lives and causes of their captors, 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.

Reviews

“intriguing” and “compelling,” “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
Editor’s Choice, New York Times
“9 New Books We Recommend This Week,” 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

“. . . 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. . . . compelling . . . . fascinating . . . . It is so precise, with a girl’s unsentimental lack of nostalgia and a hint of steeliness: a mind both exhausted and toughened . . . priming itself to move on and to forget.”
–New Republic

“In the richly emotional and elegantly constructed My Hijacking, Hodes puts her historian’s training to use to reconstruct the events of the hijacking. . . . With novel-like pacing and incredible psychological complexity, My Hijacking is an unflinching search for all the bad feelings we’d prefer not to look at.”
–Vox, “2023’s Best Books (so far)”

An “excavation of trauma, memory, and an obviously extraordinary kind of family history.”
–Harvard Magazine

A “book that constructively challenges most readers’ (as well as most publishers’ and literary agents’) basic assumptions about how memoir (and memories) work . . . . My Hijacking succeeds as a valiant and valuable act of self-investigation, a meta-autobiography that’s also a sensitive work of historiography.”
–Tablet

“A poignant and perceptive study of what it takes to heal.”
–Publishers Weekly

“A historian reckons with her own experience of a world-historical event. . . . the author writes candidly about the psychic burden of staying silent and the difficulty of excavating long-buried memories
. . . Hodes unearths trauma and contends with its aftermath.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“Though memory was not always available, to her credit she examines with great effort and intensity the reasons why she stifled feeling and recall…. What makes this work valuable for autobiography studies is its insistence on multiple perspectives of self-representation…. What is most interesting are her own self-doubts about what she remembers. … As a gifted witness of history, Hodes [is] remarkably adept in structuring narrative.”
–A/B: Auto/Biography Studies

“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

“Brilliant . . . . one of the most unusual and supremely beautiful memoirs I have read, not only this year, but in a very, very long time.” –WNBC-New York, Bill’s Books

A “gripping memoir about trauma, memory, and the connections shaped by both.”
–BookBub

“Hodes’s memoir stands out from others and not just because of the subject. As she pieces together the events of that week and the subsequent weeks after her return, she layers many perspectives to create a rich, detailed account. There’s the work of the historian, the experience of a typical 12-year-old girl who had a summer crush on a boy, the experience of an atypical 12-year-old girl whose parents are dancers and live thousands of miles apart, the cultural perspective of an American Jew with ties to Israel who becomes aware for the first time of the Palestinians’ grievances, and the adult who is trying to make sense of the most traumatic experience of her life.”
–Free-Lance Star, Fredericksburg, Va.

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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