Mother's Century

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 first two-thirds of this chronicle is about the initial one-third of her life—the European phase. The last third of this book is an account of the last two-thirds of her life—the American story. The theme that carries through this remarkable life is one of perseverance, grit in the face of often overwhelming odds and obstacles.