Overview

Above ground, the vines. Below ground, the secret the vines were keeping. Burgundy, France. November 1941. Henri Moreau, the winemaker at the Domaine Moreau-Lafarge in Pommard, has watched the German occupation systematically dismantle the lives of his Jewish neighbors for eighteen months. His wine broker of thirty years has lost his license. His hardware merchant has been forced to sell. His neighbors have been stripped of everything. And the deportations are beginning. Henri has something that most of France does not have: beneath his estate, carved by Cistercian monks eight hundred years before, lies a labyrinth of limestone caves and ancient galleries that extend beneath three neighboring properties and connect through underground passages that appear on no official map. He calls a meeting. Four winemaking families agree. The construction begins. Over four months of secret work, Henri and his neighbors transform the ancient cave system into a hidden community: ventilated, watered, provisioned, medically supported, and completely invisible to the German wine officer who requisitions Henri's bottles with polished courtesy each quarter and who does not know that two hundred people are living in the limestone beneath the bottles he is taking. The families who come below are the families of Samuel Bloch the broker, Maurice Steinberg the hardware man, the Katz family and the Goldmann family and the Weiss family and dozens more, two hundred and fourteen people at the peak, living in the dark beneath the Burgundy vines through three harvests, three Passovers, three winters, building schools and sewing circles and a congregation and a library from the materials Henri brings down the stair. Above them, the war. Above them, the German officer with his ledger and his requisitioning forms. Above them, an SD officer named Weber who has noticed that the administrative records of the Cote d'Or contain a gap between the Jewish families who were registered and the Jewish families who appear in the deportation records, and who is looking for an explanation. Below, the children are learning mathematics from a teacher who has nothing else to do. Below, a winemaker's daughter is embroidering the limestone walls. Below, a rabbi is conducting Passover with wine that the winemaker above has been keeping for three years specifically for this occasion, because he thought about it when he made the wine, in 1941, before he knew exactly what he was making it for. Drawn from the documented history of Righteous Among the Nations winemakers in Burgundy, the geological reality of the Cote d'Or's ancient cave systems, and the specific historical record of the Statut des Juifs and the French deportations, Beneath the Vineyards is a novel about what ordinary people do when they decide that the law and the right thing are not the same thing. The limestone keeps what it keeps. Unforgettable, deeply researched, and quietly devastating. Essential for readers of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay, and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

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