Born into a poor, religiously orthodox family, Litman’s birth name was probably Perel, but the rigid confines of the shtetl could not hold her. Legend holds that as a child, she was captivated by the traveling Purim players—the Purimshpil —where men traditionally played female roles. Litman saw the loophole: if a man could be a woman, why couldn’t a woman be a man? By her early teens, she had run away to join a wandering Yiddish theater troupe, cutting her hair, binding her chest, and stepping into trousers for the first time.
The chaos of the 1905 Russian Revolution and escalating pogroms in Ukraine sent Litman west. She joined the great migration of Yiddish talent, eventually landing in New York City’s Second Avenue—the "Yiddish Rialto." By the 1910s and 1920s, she was a headliner at the Hopkins Theatre and the National Theatre. pepi litman male impersonator ukrainian city born
Biographers and Yiddish scholars have long debated Litman’s private identity. Was she a lesbian in a time before that word was public? A transgender man surviving without the language of transition? A businesswoman exploiting the only gimmick that would pay? The record is hazy. She married once, briefly, to a man—a marriage that ended almost immediately. For most of her life, she lived with a series of female “roommates,” which in Yiddish theater circles was an open secret. She was likely a butch lesbian or a trans masculine figure who found her truest expression in the footlights. Born into a poor, religiously orthodox family, Litman’s
For decades, Litman was a forgotten footnote. But today, as conversations about gender fluidity and non-binary performance explode, she is being reclaimed. She is the godmother of every female-to-male performer from Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo to contemporary drag kings. Born in the dirt streets of Odessa, Ukraine—a city currently enduring a modern war for its survival—Pepi Litman stands as a monument to resilience. She proved that identity is a stage, and that sometimes, the most honest thing a person can do is put on a mustache and sing. By her early teens, she had run away
Pepi Litman died in relative obscurity in (some sources say 1937). Her death certificate, filled out by a clerk who didn’t understand her, likely listed her profession as “actress”—a final misgendering by a bureaucracy that couldn’t see the king for the queen.
For a generation of immigrant Jewish women who worked in sweatshops and lived in tenements, seeing Pepi Litman was liberation. On stage, she smoked cigarettes in long holders, slapped cards on tables, and clicked her heels. She represented a freedom from the domestic cage. For male audience members, she was a puzzle they couldn’t solve—a woman who was more masculine than they were, yet undeniably beautiful.
The rise of talkies and the decline of Yiddish theater during the Great Depression hit Litman hard. By the 1930s, the roles dried up. The young, assimilated Jewish audience no longer wanted the Old World vaudeville; they wanted gangster films and jazz.