Many of us have forgotten that there was another time prior to 2001 that four planes were simultaneously hijacked by terrorists, likely because none of these hijackings ended in death. Martha Hodes was a 12-year-old child on one of the planes, and her memoir explores the seeming paradox that while she could never forget the experience, there was also a lot that she couldn’t remember. Her book explores her own memories, tries to fill in the gaps with research, and attempts to come to terms with the fear she knows she must have felt, but was so buried that she couldn’t access it.


On September 6, 1970, Hodes was traveling with her older sister as unaccompanied minors back to New York City after spending a summer visiting their mother in Israel. When terrorists took over the plane mid flight, they were forced to land in the desert in Jordan. The passengers remained aboard for six days as the terrorists made their cause known to the world and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in European jails.


Hodes later became a historian, and much of the book shows a historian’s care to carefully research and reconstruct the events of that week. She begins with her own diary, but soon discovers that it is not only incomplete as a historical record, but it also reveals immediate self-censoring and denial of feelings. She assembles the rest of the story from newspapers, archives, phone calls to fellow passengers, and visits to all the locations involved in that fateful week. She finds pages of her sister’s diary in someone else’s research files, a forgotten film interview that she hasn’t seen in 50 years, and telegrams from her parents in the TWA archives.


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.