Audiences in Odessa, Warsaw, and New York didn’t know what to do with her. Women sighed. Men laughed uneasily, then laughed harder. In a packed Second Avenue theater, a heckler shouted, “Show us your hair!”

Zelig laughed for a full minute. Then he hired her.

“I’m no boy,” she said, and lit a cigarette exactly the way he did.

The trouble began when a traveling Yiddish operetta troupe got snowbound in Berdychiv. The lead comic, a gin-blossomed fellow named Zelig, heard Pepi doing his own jokes from the back of the room—but in a lower register. He turned. “Who’s the boy?”

The house came down. Not because she was pretty. Because she was true —truer than the gender she’d left behind in Berdychiv’s frozen lanes. She never went back. Neither did Pesha.

Pepi stopped. She walked to the footlights. She unbuttoned her coat, pulled off her cap, and ran a hand through her short, dark curls. “You want a woman?” she said, in her lowest growl. “I’m a better man than your husband.”

Her father, a melancholic bookbinder, had five daughters and no sons. He taught them all to read Hebrew, but only Pepi learned to lean like a man. She’d watch the khasidim sway in the study house—the way they planted their boots, spat into the snow, laughed from the belly. By twelve, she could mimic a tailor’s swagger. By fifteen, she was stealing his old waistcoats and cutting her hair with kitchen shears.

And that is how a Ukrainian city’s forgotten daughter became the king of every stage she touched.