Pepi Litman Male Impersonator Ukrainian City Born Pepi Litman -

It is unclear if Litman identified as what we would call "transgender" today or as a "gender-nonconforming performer." Most evidence suggests she lived her private life as a woman (she married a violinist named briefly in 1903), but off-stage, she was often photographed in tailored suits, smoking cigars with a smirk. Decline and Disappearance The advent of talking pictures and the decline of Yiddish theater after the 1929 stock market crash hit Litman hard. Her humor—linguistic, intimate, and steeped in immigrant irony—did not translate to Hollywood musicals. The last known sighting of Pepi Litman is a tattered playbill from Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1935, where she performed for a dwindling community of aging Yiddishists.

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. It is unclear if Litman identified as what

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 . The last known sighting of Pepi Litman is