Pepi Litman

Pepi Litman (, born Pesha Kahane; c. 1876 – 13 September 1930) was a cross-dressing female Yiddish vaudeville singer associated with the Broderzinger movement. Litman led a popular traveling theater troupe around Europe, performing highly satirical songs while costumed as a male Hasidic Jew. Because she frequently performed while costumed as a young boy or as a male dandy, she is considered a proto-drag king performer. Pepi Litman made numerous 78rpm recordings which capture her energetic and virtuosic singing style, and which also stand as a document of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Early life Litman was born to poor Jewish parents in Tarnopol, a city in eastern Galicia (now in Ukraine). However, a poor Jewish girl with no dowry faced very limited prospects in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, usually working uncompensated all her life to support her parents, husband, children and in-laws.

In her youth, Litman worked as a maid in a theatrical boarding house run by the parents of Max Badin, an actor who later appeared in American Yiddish films. Since she had a good singing voice she soon got involved with the itinerant Yiddish vaudevillians known as the Broderzingers. Their performances combined elements of the traditional rabbinical court jester, the badkhn (master of ceremonies at a Yiddish wedding), and the Purimshpil (traditional holiday plays, usually performed privately by amateurs, with cross-dressing, satire, and bawdy songs). Besides providing comic entertainment, the Broderzingers were influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, to advocate on behalf of modernization, education and emancipation for Jews.

Pepi married a bandleader and Broderzinger, Jacob Litman or Littman, who ran his own travelling theatre troupe. After his death she took over the troupe herself, touring around inns, small towns, health spas, cities and even private homes in Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Rumania.

Career & associates From about 1905 to 1930, Litman performed in Germany (especially in spa towns like Marienbad and Karlsbad), Poland (especially in Lemberg/Lviv), Russia (especially in Odessa),

She performed both comic and serious songs, in a broad Galitsyaner Yiddish dialect, sometimes in a Germanized form of Yiddish called daytshmerish. She recorded a number of songs, both in Lemberg, Budapest, and in New York. Pepi Litman also worked closely with Broderzinger, author and composer Shloyme Pryzament.

During World War I, Litman primarily performed in and around Odessa, where she found a following in literary circles. She was frequently a guest of Yiddish writer and editor David Frishman and author Mendele Mocher Sforim.

Death Litman returned to performing in Vienna in 1928, mapping out a route that included Karlsbad, Marienbad, and Poland. She became quite ill after this tour, and, after a stay at the Rothschild Hospital, she died on 13 September 1930. Her funeral was arranged by the Vienna Yiddish Artists Union and her burial plot was donated by the Jewish community.