In 2018, a revival of "Forgotten Divas of the Yiddish Stage" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage featured a single photograph of Pepi Litman: dark eyes, a sharp jaw, a tilted derby hat, and a smile that says, "You thought you knew me. You never even saw me coming."

Her most famous role was (a parody of Alexander II’s telegraph clerks). She would stride on stage in a too-tight military jacket, tangled in telephone wires, singing: "I am a modern man, a telephone man, But my mama still calls me by my girl’s name!" The "Grand Tour" of Exile Due to the pogroms of 1905 and rising antisemitism in the Pale of Settlement, Litman joined the great Jewish migration westward. She became a star of the Romanian Yiddish theaters (Bucharest and Iași) before sailing to London and finally landing at the epicenter of Yiddish culture: New York City’s Second Avenue .

She is believed to have died in poverty in either New York or Buenos Aires around 1940. There is no grave marker. There are no studio recordings. Pepi Litman is a ghost of a lost world—the Yiddish-speaking, pre-Holocaust, immigrant carnival of Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side. But she is also a queer ancestor. Long before Some Like It Hot , before Victor/Victoria , a Ukrainian Jewish woman in a top hat was deconstructing masculinity one laugh at a time.