Book & Author: The Silver Candlesticks -Secrets, Faith and the Inquisition

Seville, seventeenth century. Whispers can end a life; candlelight carries code. In The Silver Candlesticks, Linda Chavez follows Guiomar, a young woman who discovers her family’s hidden Jewish identity just as the Spanish Inquisition tightens its grip. What unfolds is a reckoning: a daughter guarding an inheritance of faith, a wife choosing love over fear, a mother weighing survival against truth.

Chavez began this novel after learning—through Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots—that some of her own ancestors were Converso Jews, a discovery that set off nearly a decade of research. A former White House Director of Public Liaison and a longstanding Hispanic leader, she was the highest-ranking woman in President Reagan’s White House; in 2001 she became the first Latina nominated to the U.S. Cabinet; and in 2000 the Library of Congress named her a Living Legend.

That personal thread gives the story its spark. Candlesticks passed from hand to hand become a promise kept across generations. Streets, markets, and kitchens feel alive. Power moves in the shadows. The questions land close to home: Who am I when the world tells me to hide, and what does courage cost?

Join Chavez in conversation with Rick Salomon, Senior Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and a longtime Museum leader. They will probe religious identity under pressure, the machinery of repression, and how histories of forced conversion echo in today’s debates over immigration and rising authoritarianism.

To register, click here.