Mother’s Cen­tu­ry: A Sur­vivor, Her Peo­ple and Her Times is the ​“bio-his­to­ry” of Mar­garete Sobel Her­mann, the author’s moth­er and role mod­el, who lived 101 tumul­tuous and pro­duc­tive years. Her life spanned 95 per­cent of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, dur­ing which she and her fam­i­ly expe­ri­enced much of the good, the bad and the excep­tion­al­ly ugly that marked that most vio­lent of eras. Born into a mid­dle-class Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Impe­r­i­al Vien­na, she sur­vived the First World War, famine and star­va­tion, run­away infla­tion, polit­i­cal tur­moil that makes what we are under­go­ing today pale in com­par­i­son, dis­crim­i­na­tion, street vio­lence, the Great Depres­sion, the Nazi takeover of Aus­tria, the Holo­caust dur­ing which scores of her rel­a­tives per­ished in the death camps, and the daunt­ing task of get­ting her­self and her fam­i­ly out of Europe to Amer­i­ca. Once in the Unit­ed States, she faced and over­came the for­mi­da­ble task of cre­at­ing a new life for her­self. The theme that car­ries through this remark­able life is one of per­se­ver­ance, grit in the face of often over­whelm­ing odds and obstacles.