Pepi Litman Male Impersonator Ukrainian City Born Pepi Litman [new] File
Odessa in the 1880s was a unique city: a port that blended Russian, Greek, Italian, and Jewish influences. It was here that Litman first saw a traveling Broder Singer troupe. Inspired by the cross-dressing traditions of Purim shpiels (Jewish carnival plays where men played women and vice versa), she realized that a woman in trousers could command more power, more laughs, and more pathos than a woman in a corset. Pepi Litman was not a drag king in the modern sense. She was a prima donna of parody . Her signature act involved a lightning-fast transformation: one moment she was a sobbing mother, the next she would slap on a bowler hat, puff a cigarette, and swagger across the stage as a slick, cynical "dandy" or a naive yeshiva boy.
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 . Odessa in the 1880s was a unique city:
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 was not a drag king in the modern sense
In 2018, a revival of "Forgotten Divas of the Yiddish Stage" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage featured a single photograph of Pepi Litman: dark eyes, a sharp jaw, a tilted derby hat, and a smile that says, "You thought you knew me. You never even saw me coming." Her most famous role was (a parody of
She taught her audience that gender is a costume, and that the funniest, most heartbreaking thing you can do is wear the wrong one perfectly.
On Second Avenue, she competed with giants like and Molly Picon . But Litman had a niche no one else could touch. She specialized in the badkhn-shtick (comedic jester work) but with a sapphic subtext that flew right over the heads of the conservative Yiddish press.