In 1905, during a pogrom that painted the cobblestones red, Pepi’s father was taken. She was fourteen. She stopped singing for three months. Then, on a cold night by the river Hnylopyat, she opened her mouth and released a laugh so sharp, so broken, that it turned into a song. She dressed in her father’s discarded coat, smudged her face with soot, and became a leyts —a female jester in a world that didn’t believe women had jokes.
But late at night, backstage in her dressing room in Manhattan, surrounded by greasepaint and silk robes, Pepi Litman would close her eyes. The roar of the city would fade, replaced by the specific squeak of a well in Berdychiv, the smell of fresh challah, and the echo of a childhood laugh bouncing off whitewashed walls. pepi litman birthplace ukrainian city
Berdychiv was no ordinary city. It was the lungs of the Pale of Settlement, a place where Jewish ink stained the river and Yiddish songs wove through the cobblestones. Before the fires of the 20th century, it was known as the "Jerusalem of Volhynia." And it was here, in a one-room apartment above a pickle cellar, that Pepi Litman first cried. In 1905, during a pogrom that painted the
