Search for “Pepi Litman – Mayn Rue Platz” (My Resting Place) – a haunting lullaby about her Ukrainian childhood.

Critics in Odessa called her voice “too raw, too Ukrainian”—by which they meant too real. But she took that as a compliment. You can visit Berdychiv now. The wooden house is gone. The grand synagogue is a gym. But something lingers. In the narrow streets, old women still hum minor-key melodies. And in the city’s small Yiddish museum, there’s a sepia photo of Pepi with a single line underneath: “Zingendik ibern ondenk” — “Singing over the memory.”

Before Broadway, before the silver screen, there was a girl from a Ukrainian shtetl who taught the world how to cry and laugh in the same song. There’s a photograph of Pepi Litman taken in Lviv in 1895. She’s wearing a beaded headpiece and a knowing smirk—the kind that says she’s seen the worst of the Pale of Settlement and turned it into art.

Pepi was born into this chaos. Her birthplace was a wooden house near the market square, where Polish nobles, Ukrainian peasants, and Jewish merchants argued in three languages before settling on a song.

If you’ve never heard her name, you’re not alone. History has a way of burying its divas. But in the world of Yiddish theater, Pepi Litman (born in 1874 in the Ukrainian town of Berdychiv ) was the original superstar. Think of her as the Beyoncé of the purimshpil —a singer whose voice could crack open a czar’s heart.