“It’s almost as if you weren’t there.”
That’s what a listener told me after I read my work in progress at a program called New Adventures in Nonfiction. Held at Performance Space, an intimate venue in New York City, I had opened by admitting that my current project was “definitely a new adventure for me.” I was writing a book about “the hijacking of three planes, in September 1970,” I told my audience. “The hijackers were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist organization. They hoped to trade the passengers and crew for Palestinian prisoners. I was twelve years old at the time, and a passenger on one of the planes. I was traveling with my thirteen-year-old sister, unaccompanied by adults. We were returning to New York, from Tel Aviv, and were held hostage in the Jordan desert, inside the airplane, for a week.”
After my sister and I got home, we did not talk much about the hijacking. No one took us to a therapist or sent us to a school guidance counselor. Parents of some of the other children on the plane even instructed teachers not to bring up the subject, for fear of causing further suffering. My friends in seventh grade—I returned to school two weeks late—found me apparently unchanged; indeed, decades later a classmate told me that as the years progressed she wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. Over time, the world’s memories of September 1970 faded too, making it easier for me to sustain the erasure.
Nearly a half century later, I found myself wanting to know more about what had happened to me. Because there was so much I did not remember, I started out by doing what I knew how to do best: research. Gathering and cross-checking documents seemed like the best way to make sense of my fragmented memories. The Popular Front had hijacked five flights that day, and three planes ended up in the desert. First I read a book I had studiously avoided: an account of the hijackings by a fellow hostage. In Terror in Black September, David Raab focuses his rigorous archival research on the international negotiations that ensued—he was seventeen years old at the time and published his book thirty-seven years later. As I read Raab’s descriptions of events, I marked up the margins, frequently scribbling the words “don’t remember.” In the National Archives in Washington, I read heaps of State Department telegrams. At the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in California, I read “situation reports” and transcripts of telephone calls between Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Trans World Airlines no longer exists, and at the TWA archives at the State Historical Society of Missouri I read detailed narratives of the hijacking written by each member of our crew. I gathered press coverage, watched television news segments, and read the political manifestos and autobiographical writings of my captors. I also gathered records of the experiences of other hostages—interviews they had given upon their return, legal testimony taken in lawsuits against the airlines—and set out to find some of those who were still alive.
