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: Born Odessa, Ukraine, circa 1874. Died New York. Defied categories forever. 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. The chaos of the 1905 Russian Revolution and