That city is Odesa. And to understand Pepi Litman—the world’s first major female “male impersonator” in Jewish theater—you first have to understand that Odesa, in the late 19th century, was already the world’s most accomplished impersonator of a European capital.
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 litman male impersonator birthplace ukrainian city
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. That city is Odesa
She was born in a Ukrainian city that taught her that identity is a performance. She became a legend by proving that some of the best performances are the ones that ask: What if I were not what you see? The Yiddish theater, born just a few years
For a Jewish female audience in the 1880s—corseted, confined, often illiterate—watching Pepi Litman was a radical act. She represented escape. On stage, she could walk into a tavern unescorted. She could challenge a rival to a duel. She could kiss the leading lady without scandal (because, after all, the leading lady was kissing a woman, wasn't she? Or was she?).