Greenburgh native writes Scarsdale man’s biography

Alan Bergman helps his clients tell the stories of a lifetime.

BY DEBORAH SKOLNIK

Creating legacies  Most of Bergman's clients want to make sure their descendants remember who they were.

Alan Bergman of Northern Westchester has nearly completed his latest project: crafting a book that retells the life experiences of a distinguished man in Scarsdale. The man, who would prefer not to be named, is a nonagenarian—an accomplishment in and of itself. And yet, there’s so much more to his client’s story, Bergman said. “He came to America in 1946 as a teenager from what was Persia, and then became enormously successful in his private career, which was primarily in real estate,” he explained.

The man was also a powerful advocate in the public sector, Bergman shared. “He’s done incredible things. He testified before Congress and got some highway safety laws passed.” But don’t expect to see this gentleman’s story for sale at your local bookstore; it’s intended to be an heirloom for his loved ones. “He has a huge family, complete with children and grandchildren, and wants the subsequent generations to know what he’s done, in the hope it will inspire them in their own lives,” Bergman noted.

That’s where Bergman comes in: As a professional biographer, he spends many hours with each of his clients, recording not only the tales they most want to capture for posterity, but also the ones they’ve nearly forgotten. “Many people say to me, oh, my life has been dull. And then as they start talking about it, it's just the opposite,” he said.

A page out of history

The people who hire Bergman often talk about the historical context of their lives as they were growing up, Bergman said. “If you were alive when JFK was shot, or during 9/11, that is part of your story, and so is the way you related to these events. Where were you when you learned that JFK was assassinated, and what did your parents tell you? Each person has a somewhat different answer.”

One of Bergman’s other clients, Joan, spent her childhood against the macabre backdrop of the Holocaust. For her, working with Bergman was cathartic. “During a discussion, she mentioned how during her childhood in Prague, the family’s beloved live-in nanny, Ida, one day announced that she could no longer work for them because they were Jewish. She showed them the Nazi swastika pin attached to her shirt collar and disappeared from their lives. Thinking back to that heart-wrenching moment, Joan let out a wail and wept,” Bergman said. Fortunately, Joan’s life story was ultimately uplifting: She went on to become a nurse in the U.S., helping to save others’ lives although so many had sought to extinguish hers.

Bergman's client Joan, far right, with the nanny who who left the family after joining the Nazi party.

Joan is not the only person to have shed tears in Bergman’s presence. “I worked with a man who was in his late eighties when I wrote his story. He’d always wondered how and from where his father came to America from Italy,” he recalls. “Through genealogical research, I got all those answers for him. And when he heard all the details about his father's journey to America, he wept.”

A biographer’s back story

Bergman himself grew up in a Greenburgh neighborhood then known as Hartsdale Hills. “It was just off Route 100B. I don’t think people even know anymore that that was the name of the community. It was where the Greenburgh, Ardsley, and Elmsford school districts all kind of came together,” he said. Living at the nexus of three neighborhoods provided rich and varied experiences, and perhaps accounts for Bergman’s knack for chronicling his clients’ experiences as well.

But writing people’s biographies is actually Bergman’s second act. Although he’d planned to make his career working with words, a post-college stint at his family’s graphic arts business turned permanent. “I went to work there while I was looking for a job as a copywriter. Next thing I knew, my father had Lou Gherig’s Disease, and I ended up spending forty years in graphic arts,” he says. After retiring in 2018, Bergman returned to his first love, launching his biography-writing business, Life Stories Preserved, LLC.

The biography of the Scarsdale gentleman is all but done. Clocking in at 222 pages, it awaits his signoff, after which Bergman will have copies printed. By shepherding the book through every step of the process, from the glimmer of an idea to the final, bound volume, Bergman will have preserved stories well worth telling. And a man and his life story will remain known—even to descendants he will never know.