Pepi Litman Birthplace Ukrainian City Portable 〈SAFE • 2027〉

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

Her father was a melamed, a tired teacher of sleepy boys, but her mother, Faige, was a badkhn ’s daughter—a clown’s child. Faige used to say that Pepi came out of the womb humming a lament. By the age of six, Pepi could mimic the cantor’s wail, the butcher’s argument, and the cry of a jealous bride. In 1905, during a pogrom that painted the

But Berdychiv was also a city of masks. Under Tsar Nicholas II, life was a tightrope over a pit. Pepi learned the art of the grammen , the comic verse, as a weapon. She would stand by the Holy Gates of the old synagogue, pulling faces, making the porters laugh so hard they dropped their bundles. "A joke is a bullet that leaves no shell," she would later say. Then, on a cold night by the river