Her most famous role was (a parody of Alexander II’s telegraph clerks). She would stride on stage in a too-tight military jacket, tangled in telephone wires, singing: "I am a modern man, a telephone man, But my mama still calls me by my girl’s name!" The "Grand Tour" of Exile Due to the pogroms of 1905 and rising antisemitism in the Pale of Settlement, Litman joined the great Jewish migration westward. She became a star of the Romanian Yiddish theaters (Bucharest and Iași) before sailing to London and finally landing at the epicenter of Yiddish culture: New York City’s Second Avenue .
She is believed to have died in poverty in either New York or Buenos Aires around 1940. There is no grave marker. There are no studio recordings. Pepi Litman is a ghost of a lost world—the Yiddish-speaking, pre-Holocaust, immigrant carnival of Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side. But she is also a queer ancestor. Long before Some Like It Hot , before Victor/Victoria , a Ukrainian Jewish woman in a top hat was deconstructing masculinity one laugh at a time. Her most famous role was (a parody of
One legendary anecdote from the in Chicago (1912): Litman was playing a handsome Cossack captain wooing a Jewish maiden. When she knelt and kissed the maiden’s hand, a voice from the gallery shouted, "That’s a woman!" Litman broke character, stood up, tipped her cap, and replied in Yiddish: "So? A woman knows better what a woman likes!" The house erupted in applause. The Secret Diary: Identity in the Wings Recent scholarship (notably by Dr. Lillian Faderman) has unearthed fragments of Litman’s correspondence. In a letter to a friend in 1916, she wrote: "On the street, I am Miss Litman. I am tired, my feet hurt, the corset is a prison. But when I button the waistcoat and the boots, I become a king. I have more freedom in a fake mustache than I do in a real skirt." She is believed to have died in poverty
In the smoky, raucous world of Yiddish vaudeville, where audiences threw coins (and sometimes vegetables) at the stage, one figure stood out not for playing a princess, but for playing a prince. Her name was , and for over three decades, this Ukrainian-born firecracker was the most celebrated male impersonator the Yiddish stage ever produced. Origins: From a Ukrainian Shtetl to the Footlights Born Perel (Pepi) Litman around 1874 in Odessa, Ukraine —then a bustling, cosmopolitan hub of the Russian Empire and a hotbed of Yiddish culture—Litman grew up in an era of massive Jewish migration and cultural ferment. Unlike many of her contemporaries who were pushed into singing by religious choirs, Pepi was pulled to the stage by the raw energy of the badchen (wedding jester) and the emerging Yiddish operetta. Pepi Litman is a ghost of a lost