Odesa in Pepi’s youth was a city of displaced identities: runaway serfs, bankrupt nobles, Talmudic scholars who had discovered secularism, and women who had discovered freedom. The Yiddish theater, born just a few years before Pepi in neighboring Iași (Romania), found its rowdy, irreverent home in Odesa. Unlike the pious shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, Odesa allowed a woman to play a man playing a lover. It allowed gender to become a prop.
She died in obscurity. No known recordings exist. Only one photograph is reliably attributed to her: a young person with sharp cheekbones, a bowler hat, and a carnation, smirking like they know a secret you’ll never guess. pepi litman male impersonator birthplace ukrainian city
Like so many of Odesa’s children—from Isaac Babel to Vladimir Jabotinsky—Pepi eventually left. The rise of cinematic film, the brutality of the pogroms, and the chaos of the Russian Revolution scattered the Yiddish theater diaspora to New York, Buenos Aires, and Warsaw. Pepi followed. She performed in Second Avenue theaters, but the magic didn’t translate. American audiences wanted broad comedy or tear-jerking melodrama. They didn’t want a Ukrainian Jewish woman who could make them forget their own eyes. Odesa in Pepi’s youth was a city of
Why did this particular art form—the Jewish male impersonator—emerge in a Ukrainian port city? The answer is liminality. It allowed gender to become a prop
In the collective memory of Yiddish theater, the name Pepi Litman is a ghost wrapped in a tuxedo. She is a footnote in a footnote: a woman famous for pretending to be a man, born in a city famous for pretending to be many things.
Pepi’s most famous bit was a mirror scene. She would appear as a bashful young maiden, be courted by a male actor, then flee backstage. Seconds later, “he” would emerge—the same face, now in a waistcoat—and begin flirting with the same man’s wife. The audience would scream with the cognitive dissonance. One body, two genders, three corners of a love triangle.
The Man Who Wasn’t There: Pepi Litman and the Lost Gender of the Shtetl Stage