Today, Odesa’s grand opera house still stands, though its Jewish theater district is a memory of cobblestones. But every so often, in the repertory of a Tel Aviv fringe company or a queer Yiddish revival in Berlin, someone performs the mirror scene. And for two minutes, Pepi Litman is resurrected in the space between a man’s bow tie and a woman’s wink.
Why did this particular art form—the Jewish male impersonator—emerge in a Ukrainian port city? The answer is liminality. pepi litman male impersonator birthplace ukrainian city
The Man Who Wasn’t There: Pepi Litman and the Lost Gender of the Shtetl Stage Today, Odesa’s grand opera house still stands, though
She died in obscurity. No known recordings exist. Only one photograph is reliably attributed to her: a young person with sharp cheekbones, a bowler hat, and a carnation, smirking like they know a secret you’ll never guess. Why did this particular art form—the Jewish male
Odesa in Pepi’s youth was a city of displaced identities: runaway serfs, bankrupt nobles, Talmudic scholars who had discovered secularism, and women who had discovered freedom. The Yiddish theater, born just a few years before Pepi in neighboring Iași (Romania), found its rowdy, irreverent home in Odesa. Unlike the pious shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, Odesa allowed a woman to play a man playing a lover. It allowed gender to become a prop.
Pepi (née Perel) Litman was born in the 1870s in what was then the Russian Empire’s most glamorous and lawless port. Odesa was a place where Italian opera houses sat across from Moldovan wine cellars, where Greek smugglers dined next to Hasidic merchants. It was a city of masks. So perhaps it was inevitable that it would produce a woman who made her living by removing one mask and putting on another.