Pepi Litman — Male Impersonator Ukrainian City Born Pepi Litman ((free))

Dateline: The Yiddish Theaters of Eastern Europe & New York, c. 1900–1930

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. Dateline: The Yiddish Theaters of Eastern Europe &

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. There is no grave marker

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. But she is also a queer ancestor