Jozef Obrebski (1905-1967) had a moderately long, interesting, and, in some respects, tragic life. The consequences of the Second World War and the subsequent Communist domination of Eastern Europe altered his life profoundly. While he and his immediate family escaped relatively unscathed and even his relatively voluminous scholarly documents were preserved he was never able to successfully readapt to the life he chose first in the lands of the then British Empire and finally in America. It would indeed be a limited approach to judge a person's life simply by their public record, in this case by a published output. Further it certainly is a tribute to Obrebski's scholarly life that now more than a third of a century after his death that scholars in Macedonia and Poland have chosen to explore in detail the documents he left behind.