An Infamous Hijacking, Revisited Through a Child’s Eyes

In September 1970, when she was 12, Martha Hodes and her sister were flying home alone to New York from Israel when their plane was hijacked by armed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

It was redirected to an airstrip in the Jordanian desert, and joined by two others. Passengers were held hostage for six days before the hijackers released them unharmed, and blew up the planes.

It was a shocking event that drew headlines around the world. But Hodes and her family barely talked about it afterward. “I love school!” she wrote in her diary the first week back. “Everything’s great!”

Even decades later, Hodes, now a historian at New York University, brought it up only with close friends, and then only offhandedly.

“They all said something similar — that I spoke about it in a way that was very dismissive,” she recalled.

Historians are in the business of digging stories out of the archives. But in “My Hijacking,” published June 6 by Harper, Hodes also goes digging through her own recollections. The book is the story of a dramatic and politically charged event, but also an exploration of trauma and memory, the relationship between our older and younger selves and the connection between personal experience and capital-H history.

That last one is a live question in the historical profession, where a growing number of scholars have written books that marry personal and family history with archival scholarship — sometimes upending both treasured family stories and traditional scholarly notions of truth and objectivity alike.

Not that Hodes, a scholar of 19th-century America, was an eager memoirist. After reading her first draft, her husband asked what she wanted readers to learn about her. She answered, only half-jokingly, “Nothing.”

The book has won largely admiring advance reviews (Publishers Weekly called it “poignant and perceptive”), and been excerpted in The New Yorker. But Hodes still expresses a bit of cool, self-appraising distance.

“Part of me wants to say, ‘I’m happy with my book! I love my book!,’” she said. But the word she uses is “satisfied.”

“Writing about my own life, exposing my feelings and myself to readers, was difficult,” she said. “I’m still thinking about why I did that.”

Hodes, 64, grew up in an artistic, secular Jewish household in New York City, where both her parents were Martha Graham dancers. At the time of the hijacking, she and her sister Catherine, 13, had spent the summer in Tel Aviv, where their mother, who had remarried, had moved to help found the Batsheva Dance Company.

Hodes was a bookish child who dreamed of being a writer. She felt a kinship with Anne Frank, who had the same birthday. She also kept a diary, which she named “Claire,” a homage to Frank’s “Kitty.”

After college, she earned a masters in comparative religion at Harvard. But during a work-study job at the Schlesinger Library, she became fascinated with archives. “This was people’s lives, their letters and diaries,” she said. “Oh man, I loved that so much.”

In the Ph.D. program in history at Princeton, she gravitated toward challenging subjects and hard archival digging. Her first book, “White Women, Black Men,” published in 1997, looked at interracial sex in the South before the Civil War (a period, she argues, when such liaisons, while stigmatized, were not always violently punished). The evidence was so fragmentary — “shards and bones,” she wrote — that she sometimes wondered if she shouldn’t write it as fiction.

“Mourning Lincoln,” published in 2015, presented the problem of archival abundance. It examined divergent reactions to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: not the polished reminiscences published years later, but the raw immediate emotions of ordinary Americans — Black and white, Northern and Southern — mined from thousands of letters and diaries.

In her introduction, Hodes said that book (which won the Lincoln Prize) was partly sparked by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the intense collective response. She didn’t note it then, but that event also spurred her to revisit her memories of the hijacking.

She started by writing down everything she could remember. The memories were disjointed, confusing, emotionally flat. “But for the first time ever,” she writes, “I wanted to know more.”

But she didn’t really start working on it until 15 years later, after a conversation with her agent, Wendy Strothman, who asked about her next project. Hodes halfheartedly floated a few archival ideas. But then she said, “There’s also this book I know I have to write.”

“The whole atmosphere just changed,” Strothman, who had never heard about the hijacking before, recalled. “My jaw dropped.”

Initially, Hodes said, she was curious about the event itself, which involved five planes in total. (While most hostages were released after arriving in Amman, more than three dozen were held until two weeks later, when the Jordanian Armed Forces launched a military operation aimed at driving out the Palestinian guerrilla factions who had established a state-within-a-state — an episode remembered by Palestinians as Black September.)

Her first research stop was the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, where she found the papers of a fellow hostage, a sociologist who had later interviewed Hodes and her sister for a scholarly article about the hijacking.

She also combed the archives of the airline, the State Department and the International Red Cross (which had acted as negotiators), and immersed herself in newspaper and television coverage. If Hodes’s turn toward memoir was surprising to friends, her diligence was not.

“She’s a really, really serious archival historian that takes the archives, that takes evidence and facts, really, really seriously,” said James Goodman, a historian at Rutgers-Newark. “She’s just not someone who would be comfortable playing fast and loose with them.”

Hodes also tracked down other former hostages, some of whom shared notes and documents. But the crucial source, she thought, would be her diary, which she had written in every day during the hijacking — and then threw into a box, never looking at it again.

As a historian, Hodes was well aware that even first-person testimony written close to events, while gold to scholars, needs to be read critically. But as she researched, Hodes was startled by how unreliable her diary was.

She had matter-of-factly noted when they ran low on food. (“More bread & water. Oh dear!”) But she made no mention of the frightening things that she never forgot — like the night the hijackers wired the plane with explosives.

She also vividly remembered lighthearted (and true) details like jumping rope with the hijackers, or sitting under the wing with fellow hostages singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” changing the lyrics to “living on a jet plane.”

But there were many things she had suppressed entirely, including the fact that she had been afraid. It’s still an emotion she can’t directly recall.

“I’m a historian, I know memory is unreliable,” she said. “But it was so fascinating to see it in my own documents, my own life.”

Her diary, she realized, was profoundly shaped by trauma — less a record of events than a story she could tell and retell later, to reassure her parents and herself. “My diary,” she said, “was a crafted version of the story I could live with.”

At N.Y.U., Hodes teaches a seminar on history and autobiography, and the slippery relationship between them. Not that she wants to “go all postmodern on my profession.”

“The last thing you want to say to young historians is that nothing in the archives is reliable,” she said. “We have to tell stories.” And at a certain point, “we have to tell the story the documents leave us.”

Hodes also had to wrestle with a particularly fraught question: how to tell the hijackers’ side of the story?

She did not seek out anyone connected with the Popular Front, a Marxist-Leninist organization founded in 1967, which embraced hijackings, bombings and other forms of “revolutionary violence.”

Hijackings were a way of seizing international attention. “When we hijack a plane, it has more effect than if we kill a hundred Israelis in battle,” the group’s founder, George Habash, told a German magazine in 1970.

To recreate the hijackers’ perspective, Hodes relied on published interviews, recordings and documents from the group’s online archives, as well as books by the hijackers (including two by Bassam Abu Sharif, who later became an adviser to Yasir Arafat).

“I felt like I had a lot of evidence for all the different sides” Hodes said.

In the book, she revisits the position papers the hijackers had made the hostages read, explaining their cause, and recalls the stories some told about being pushed out of their homes upon the founding of Israel, and growing up in refugee camps.

Hodes the historian recounts the political context dispassionately, noting how she and her sister, who grew up “extremely secular” and with little exposure to Zionism, differed in perspective from many fellow Jewish hostages, some of whom were Holocaust survivors.

But when it comes to judgment, Hodes the memoirist sticks close to her empathetic child’s-eye view.

“Catherine and I just felt sorry for everyone,” she writes. When it came to the conflict, “We couldn’t think of a solution.”

That approach, Hodes acknowledged, may draw criticism. But the book, she emphasized, is just her story of the hijacking, not the story.

But in a way, she said, it’s also someone else’s story.

“Writing this was a journey of empathy for that little girl in the past,” she said. “Who is me, but is also not me.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. @jennyschuessler

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