I am not dissatisfied
This is what I want to do with it
SarahLenny Kuhr (2013)
Lenie ‘Lenny’ Kuhr was already well over 50 when she entered Sarah cheerfully and candidly looked back on her life up to that point. She no longer had the dreams of the past, but ‘there are still stories waiting, until the end of my path’. She was a grandmother now, and played on the beach in Tel Aviv with ‘children’ – her grandchildren.
Singer-songwriter Kuhr (74) wrote the lyrics and music in 2013 Wrong Sarahsa performance by her sister Ine and Heddy Lester about women over 50. In 2022 Sarah a second life. The musical self-portrait appeared on a record in a new arrangement (Lenny Kuhr) which she released on pop label Excelsior.
In another song, Still a troubadour (text: Stef Bos), reference was also made to her past. Of The troubadour she broke through to an international audience in 1969, as one of the four winners of the Eurovision Song Contest. In the follow-up to Bos she sang about the peaks and valleys in her life: ‘Pride before the fall / The snow line and the valley / I know it all / It is part of my story.’
Lenny Kuhr is not easily defeated. After she was attacked and verbally abused by pro-Palestinian activists in Theater De Leest in Waalwijk at the end of last month because of her Jewish background and her views on the war in Gaza, she said she had not been afraid. “Well angry.” Her two daughters live in Israel, she visits them often. One of her four grandchildren, Ozz, was seriously injured in October after a firefight with Hamas.
She indirectly owes her happiness, two children, to an incident that was high on the media news agenda for months at the time, in 1973. Kuhr was molested by a man at Haarlem station late at night, resulting in a broken nose.
A year later she married the ENT doctor and plastic surgeon who had treated her at the VU hospital. With Gideon Bialystock, of Russian-German origin and raised in the Netherlands, she had her two daughters and moved to Israel for a few years. In 1974 she converted to the Jewish faith.
Her next life partner was lyricist Herman Pieter de Boer, the man who wrote the hit for her, Visit (1980), which she recorded together with the French boys’ choir Les Poppys. In the year of the break with De Boer, 1993, Lenny Kuhr lost her voice due to a neurological condition. The recovery took years and led her on the path of spirituality and meditation.
She also got involved in football. It was a side step that earned trainer Rinus Michels his nickname. Of The Generalwritten by Gerrit den Braber and with the melody of The troubadourshe paid tribute to him in 1974 in the Oranje players’ hotel in Hiltrup, a day after the famous ‘swimming pool incident’.
Michels was happy with it. The troubadour from Eindhoven was thanked with a kiss in the party room of Waldhotel Krautkrämer.
