In memoriam: Dan Greenburg, who poked fun with his pen, dies at 87

NEW YORK: Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women, and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87. His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.

Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother. “Never accept a compliment,” Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?” “Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”

“I don’t know. First, the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”

Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.

He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex. He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.

The versatile Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy, and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).

Though he was a native Chicagoan, Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors. He wrote more than 150 humour pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.

“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”

The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.