Nurit Chinn's: Internee Number 6

Join us for a reading of Nurit Chinn’s (UK) new play in development, Internee Number 6. In collaboration with the Primo Levi Center New York. Followed by a panel with Chinn and Natalia Indrimi, the Executive Director of the Primo Levi Center. Moderated by Frank Hentschker.

Internee Number 6 is a theatrical adaptation of a memoir by the same name, written by Maria Eisenstein and first published in 1944. It was largely written in the summer of 1940. The play, adapted by Nurit Chinn, explores the little-known experiences of Jewish women imprisoned in Fascist internment camps in Italy during the Holocaust. It follows Eisenstein and other foreign Jewish women as they navigate daily life in the camp ran by Italian fascists—forming friendships, staging quiet acts of rebellion, and grappling with profound uncertainty as Hitler’s forces advance across Europe. The script draws almost entirely from Eisenstein’s original text, the earliest known memoir written from inside an Italian Fascist internment camp.

Nurit Chinn is a playwright and producer from London, currently based in Brooklyn. Her plays have been developed or presented at Alliance Theatre, the Center for New Jewish Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, VAULT Festival, Dixon Place, and others. Her play Godbird will be produced at The Brick in January as part of Exponential Festival 2026. Nurit is a 2024/5 New Jewish Culture Fellow, winner of the 2025 Conchord Theatricals OOB festival, and an alum of the Royal Court Theatre’s Writers’ Group. Her plays have been finalists for the Princess Grace Award/Fellowship at New Dramatists, the Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship, and the Alliance/Kendeda Award. Nurit is currently under commission by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and Centro Primo Levi, where she is also the Playwright-In-Residence. She is also the Co-Director of the Exponential Festival, alongside Bailey Williams. BA: Yale University; MFA: Brooklyn College, Playwriting.

Natalia Indrimi has been the director of Centro Primo Levi New York since 2007. Between 2000 and 2007, she was Director of Programs at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Programs she curated in this position include Hannah Arendt's, Elias Canetti’s, and Emmanuel Levinas' centennial conferences, the first New York tributes to Bruno Schulz and Clarice Lispector, and the series "Editing America" on the immigrant gaze as a form of cultural and political editing. Since 2005 she has coordinated research projects and a seminar series on fascism, totalitarianism, and the persecution of the Jews in Italy. She coordinated research projects on the Jews of colonial territories, including Fiume and Rhodes. She curated the exhibition on the Jews of Rhodes, Los Corassones Avlan. As director of Centro Primo Levi NY, she focuses her work on programs, research, and debate on the public display of history. 

Centro Primo Levi (est. 2000) has been a home where scholars, writers, scientists, and artists can develop and discuss their work in three areas of interest: (1) Primo Levi’s work and its resonance in different societies and times; (2) Italian Fascism, its expansion to Europe and beyond, and the persecution of Jews in Italy; (3) History and historiography through the eyes of the Italian peninsula’s Jewish minorities; (4) Languages, text, and translation.

CPL’s research projects have been chronicled in part in the online zine Printed Matter, the imprint CPL Editions, and CPL Minidocs and video library. Work-in-progress is periodically discussed at partner venues (CUNY, NYU, NYPL), at venues that CPL inhabited for a limited time: the historic Vanni bookstore and Vol de Nuit in the West Village. Most recently, CPL has spearheaded the Sixth Floor Bookhouse, a joint venture with the American Sephardi Federation and Dan Wyman, a book dealer specializing in 18th- to 20th-century Hebraica and Jewish American press, who joined the effort to develop a communal space dedicated to books.

CPL collaborates with libraries and archives, facilitates the placement and study of private documentary collections, and promotes the appreciation of historical books in its publications and public talks. CPL offers internships and fellowships. We welcome a broad range of proposals with various degrees of connection to CPL’s main lines of work. Fellows are given workspace, access to libraries and archives, and the possibility to present their work-in-progress.  

Primo Michele Levi: (Italian: 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include: If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although that has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident.