My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering
Historian Martha Hodes explores what happened to her own memories, and how she tried to get them back, after being held hostage on an airplane in 1970 in her new memoir.
Listen 50:00
Martha Hodes is a historian and author of 'My Hijacking' (Photograph by Bruce Dorsey)
Back in September 1970, 12-year-old Martha Hodes and her 13-year-old sister were flying to New York from Israel when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked their plane. Two other jets were hijacked by the same armed group, and all three were forced to land in the Jordanian desert where the passengers and crew were held, not knowing their fate.
It was a terrifying international incident – and Hodes spent the last fifty years suppressing her fear and anxiety about what she had endured. Hodes is a historian and decided to investigate why she was so determined to block out what happened so many years ago.
In her new book, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, she reconstructs the events of her ordeal by digging through historical archives, press reports and interviews with other hostages including her sister to understand her own amnesia, in a very moving story about how trauma can rewrite our memories.
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