The Last Shabbat

Amsterdam, 2025.
At the Rijksmuseum, art conservator Alma Linaers has spent her life repairing what time tries to erase. But when she begins restoring a small family painting inherited from her grandmother, something impossible happens: beneath the varnish, the pigments begin to shift, and the past stirs.

Seville, 1492.
On the eve of the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, three Sephardic brothers gather for their final Shabbat. One will flee into exile. One will hide in silence. One will renounce his faith to survive. Their choices will echo across five centuries, far beyond their own lives.

As Alma uncovers the painting's hidden layers, she realises it is more than an heirloom. It is a doorway between worlds-a fragment of Sephardic memory, and perhaps a message meant for her alone. As antisemitism resurfaces across modern Europe, the voices rising from the canvas begin to mirror the questions of her own time:
When history returns, do we flee, hide or stand?

The Last Shabbat is a luminous dual-timeline historical novel about identity, exile, and the fragile persistence of memory. Blending historical depth with emotional resonance, it traces the invisible threads that bind generations together, and asks how we remain ourselves when the past refuses to stay silent.

The Last Shabbat is the opening movement of The Descendants Saga, a literary trilogy exploring the hidden legacy of a Sephardic family across five centuries.