Nora Kovach

Nora Kovach (June 13, 1931 – January 18, 2009) was a Hungarian ballerina who became historically significant as one of the first highly publicized defectors from the Soviet bloc in the field of dance. Trained at the schools of the Budapest Opera Ballet and the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, Kovach rose to the position of leading dancer at the Budapest State Opera alongside her husband, fellow ballet dancer Istvan Rabovsky.

In May 1953, the couple was sent on tour to East Berlin. During that engagement, they slipped away from a scheduled performance, boarded a subway train at a station beneath their hotel, and crossed into West Berlin. In an interview with Time magazine conducted a few months after the defection, Kovach described the emotional weight of the decision, recounting that she could not sleep for two nights afterward because she was thinking of her mother, home, and family, but concluded that freedom was worth it.

Impresario Sol Hurok promoted the couple following their escape, and their first performance in the West took place on August 25, 1953, with the Festival Ballet in London. They appeared in Don Quixote by Ludwig Minkus and received what was described as an ovation of the first magnitude. The couple traveled to the United States later that year, arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey aboard the SS Nieuw Amsterdam on November 13, 1953. Upon arrival, Kovach told The New York Times that despite their privileged status in the Soviet system — which afforded them money, an automobile, and a comfortable home — they had never possessed the freedom they most desired. In November 1953 they appeared on Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town, and a review of their first American stage performance on February 10, 1954, in the New York Herald Tribune noted that while Western audiences were struck by their Soviet-developed technique, the accent on virtuosity occasionally came at the expense of balletic line.

Kovach and Rabovsky subsequently performed across the United States, Europe, Japan, and Latin America. In 1956, the two were among the passengers rescued from the Italian ocean liner SS Andrea Doria following its collision with the MS Stockholm off Nantucket, Massachusetts, and they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show multiple times after the rescue. In 1960, Kovach made her Broadway debut in the revue From A to Z. In the early 1960s, she and Rabovsky founded their own dance troupe, called Bihari. Kovach later opened a ballet school in Plainview, New York in 1969.

In her personal life, Kovach divorced Rabovsky and married Tibor Szegezdy, who died in 1985. She was survived by her third husband, Steve Farago, a brother, and two stepchildren. Kovach died on January 18, 2009.