Sarah Bergmann
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Sarah Bergmann | |
|---|---|
사라 버그만 | |
| File:Sarah Bergmann.JPG Sarah Bergmann in May 2015 | |
| Ministry of Finance | |
| Assumed office November 14, 2014 | |
| President | Sui Anyi |
| Prime Minister | Do Eun-sook |
| Deputy | Nikolai Tretyakov |
| Preceded by | Maik Ostrowska |
| Personal details | |
| Born | July 5, 1958 |
| Political party | Liberal Party (Anikatia) |
Sarah Bergmann (Anikatian: 사라 버그만; born 5 July 1958) is the current Minister of Finance. She entered office on 14 November 2014. She is notable as one of a few non-Oriental Anikatian political leaders from the small Anglo-Anikatian minority. Bergmann has become the first Jewish politician in Anikatia to become a part of the Cabinet.
Bergmann spent most of her life outside of Anikatia in exile as a refugee from the DSRA regime, living and working in the nearby Belhavian crown territory of New Shelvoy and attending university in Arthurista. She later returned with most of her expatriate family to Anikatia falling the fall of the DSRA and received dual-citizenship as both a Belhavian and Anikatian.
Early life
Bergmann was born to Miriam and Saul Bergmann in Buchyeon, Gyeolgung on July 5th, 1958. Her parents were both ethnic Jews who settled in southern Anikatia from their native Belhavia after the Anikatian government encouraged foreign immigration with land grants, tax breaks, and other incentives. Saul Bergmann ran a successful import-export business, as well as a tea plantation on which the family lived.
They were the only Jewish family in half the province, and they comingled with the other Anglo-Anikatian landowner elites in the area, who were mostly white former Belfrasian settlers. Bergmann described her life as peaceful and idyllic as a child in her 2005 autobiography The Rising Sun: My Journey in the World and My Return Home, saying "I recall that whether it was a cool winter or wet summer, life was so simple. My playmates and I played, studied at school, ran to Momma on the front porch at the Big House. I remember tall, lanky Oriental servants bring my friends and I chilled iced tea or little treats for us...it was a daydream, soon to come crashing down and eject me from the only place I've ever called home."
Revolution of 1967
Flight from Anikatia
The 1967 Communist Revolution erupted when Bergmann was just short of turning age 10. For several years before the revolution, there was rising discontent and acts of disobedience among Oriental servants and field-hands, and in the months prior to the violence her father and other minority white leaders in the province organized a militia to control the increasingly-restless Oriental populations. On May 5th, violence in the country's urban centers rippled out into the rural countryside, and that night mobs of Communist Party-led Oriental workers, students, and dissidents armed themselves and started to go plantation-to-plantation, killing, imprisoning, or assaulting the white elite families and their senior Oriental house servants and torching or laying claim to the properties in the "name of the native Anikatian people."
The Bergmann family, which operated their plantation in a more mild and humane way, had fewer dissidents on it. Regardless, several Communist sympathizers raided the home's armory, beat up the Bergmann's trusted house staff, and locked up the family as they pillaged and destroyed the main home. Several militiamen led by a neighboring Belfrasian landowner arrived and opened fire on the mob, dispersing it momentarily. The Bergmann family grabbed a few family possessions and escaped in their family car as the tea fields of their plantation were lit on fire.
After a long 4 hour drive, the family arrived in the small port city of Yeoposu, under control of white militias loyal to the besieged government in Antiytia. Several ships owned by Saul Bergmann's import-export business were in port, and her father and other displaced landowners began evacuating trapped Anglo-Anikatians, their personal family servants, and non-Orientals onto the ships. A regiment of Anikatian infantry that had pledged its loyalty to the Communists marched on the city, panicking the dispossessed mobs of former elites. When the regiment arrived, the defending white militias crumbled in less than an hour of street fighting, and the Bergmanns got on the last ship, their family yacht the R.A.S. Sunset, and set off.
Resettling in New Shelvoy
On May 7th, the family made its way to Port David, New Shelvoy in Belhavia across the North East Sea. There, they were given "refugee status" and resettled in a small port city north of Port David where they met Sarah's uncle and his children, who themselves had fled from Antiytia as the city fell to Communist forces. Her beloved Aunt Norma, a fixture of her early life, had been killed in the crossfire, and Bergmann harbored a deep enmity towards Communism and its followers in the decades since.
She initially suffered trauma symptoms in what doctors were later characterize as PTSD, and she required years of therapy to cope with the events of May 1967. Her father had maintained some offshore financial accounts, and the family was able to live comfortably despite the collapse of his company and plantation estate.
Education
She attended a string of Jewish day schools, and later the Tel Evas Seminary for high school. For higher education, she went to the University of Loweport in Loweport, Arthurista, where she studied finance and communications from 1974 until 1979. She then took a year off to study in post-college seminary in Belhavia before returning to New Shelvoy.
Career
Despite the rise of New Left feminism across the globe, in New Shelvoy Bergmann was discriminated by numerous businesses who refused to hire a woman. Her father intervened and got her a job as a budget analyst in the territorial government, though none of her colleagues took her seriously and several tried to get her fired.
After performing good work, her immediate supervisor promoted her to Assistant Budget Analyst and she led a group effort to write the 1985 New Shelvoy Territorial Budget for the governor. Despite growing respect in her workplace, she remained single, which concerned her family. At her mother's behest, she took time off to undergo shidduchim, a period of traditional, supervised Jewish dating where she met her husband, Eric Berman. They got married in November 1985.
She gave birth to twins, Deborah and Samson, in August 1986. In 1989, the family - with the addition of toddler Leah - moved to Stveni City in the Stveni Islands, where she worked as a budget analyst and auditor for the Stveni chapter of the Free Anikatia Movement. In 1991, the family chose to flee after the fall of Stveni Islands. During the panicked flight, Bergmann suffered another PTSD attack.
Bergmann and her family lived for a time in Lion's Rock, where she paused her employment to care for her young family while her husband Eric worked in the investment banking industry. In mid-1997, she received an offer to serve as an comptroller for Victorian Shipping Line, a large corporation in Isn Deslen, Belfras. Once again, they moved.
Once the DSRA fell in late 2001, Bergmann watched the events unfold with interest. The new Republic quickly announced a general amnesty to expatriates, especially Anglo-Anikatians, abroad and to members of the FAM. Her husband and many members of her family wanted to return, but Bergmann refused to go, still embittered by her experiences with the DSRA regime. Between 2002 and 2003, most of her family that resided in New Shelvoy upped and moved back.
In 2004, after making the arrangements and also keeping her and her family's Belhavian citizenship, Bergmann returned and was restored her Anikatian citizenship. The family maintained a residence in Antiytia and was granted back the formerly-nationalized tea plantation in Gyeolgung as a form of reparations by the former DSRA government.
She became politically active, her anticommunist enmity softening as she reintegrated in Anikatian culture. She joined the Liberal Party, and became a political appointee and midlevel budget control official in the Anikatian government under the Liberal-UNDP coalition between 2005 and 2006.
After the UNDP won its own coalition government in 2006, she lost her position. She moved to be the Chief Financial Officer for the Liberal Party itself, a role she kept until 2014. As part of the new PSU-UNDP-LPA coalition in 2014, right-leaning hardliners within the Liberals managed to get her appointment as Finance Minister through as a check on the new Socialist-led government.
Political views
A staunch Liberal, Bergmann is considered to be on the party's right-wing but within its mainstream, marking her as center-right in Anikatian politics. While her politics have remained similar overtime, due to the rightward position of the political center in Belhavian politics compared to the Anikatian one, she was considered slightly left-of-center. When she was in Belhavia, she was apart of the Liberal Democrats.
She is a strong proponent of privatizations, free trade, and tax cuts.
Family and personal life
She is married to Eric Berman since 1985, approaching 30 years of marriage.
She has four children, ordered by age: Deborah (26), Samson (26), Leah (23), and Gamliel (17).