Speaking only Yiddish till the age of three, he grew up in the Boston suburbs and attended Roxbury Memorial High School.
Encouraged by his mother and uncle, J.P.Savel, illustrator for the Boston Post, Berger's interest and passion in painting were evident very early.
His love of the old masters, the immediate approach of the watercolors of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, and the current trends of Modernism, Cubism and Abstraction were the influences that would stay with him throughout his life.
Karl Zerbe, the principle painting teacher at the school, thought Berger and his classmates, Reed Kay, Jack Kramer, David Aronson, and George Sheridan were among best students.
“For eager young Americans, most of whom had traveled little—and constrained in the 1930s by the Depression and in the 1940s by World War II and its aftermath—contact with Hofmann (and Zerbe) served as an invaluable alternative for direct contact with the European sources of Modernism”.
Afterwards, with a traveling scholarship awarded by the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Berger went to Europe with his first wife, the painter Marilyn Powers.
[9] While in France, Berger studied with cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris and frequented Georges Braque's studio.
[12] This focus on combining the formal elements of color, shape and compositional scheme to make a good picture, never interfered with an overall joy of discovery through the act of painting.