After a great deal of trouble, he succeeded in October of 1881 in getting the Government's permission to issue a Judeo-German weekly, the _Jüdisches Volksblatt_. He felt that his duty was once more with the masses, that they needed the advice of better-informed men in the impending danger, and at the advanced age of sixty-five he once more took upon his shoulders a publication in which he had no supporters. In the first two years the weekly was bare of literary productions. Except for an occasional poem by J. L. Gordon, and here and there a feuilleton, the rest was occupied by political news, for which Zederbaum had to supply the leaders. Abramowitsch and Linetzki had ceased writing, and no new generation had had time to develop literary talents. The tone of the new novel, to do any positive good, had to be different from those current before. Dick had been writing for the people with little regard to the people's familiarity with the scenes described, while Abramowitsch wrote of the people but not necessarily to the level of an humble audience. Now the author had to write both of and for the people, he had to be in touch with them not as a critic or moralizer, but as a sympathetic friend. In 1883, two such men made their debut in the _Jüdisches Volksblatt_: Mordechai Spektor, the calm observer of the life in the lower strata of society, and Solomon Rabinowitsch, the impulsive painter of scenes from the middle classes. Of these, the first came nearest to what Zederbaum regarded as requisite for a writer in those troublous times, and he called Spektor to St. Petersburg to take charge of the literary part of his weekly. In the short time of his connection with the _Volksblatt_, and later as editor of several periodicals of his own, Spektor[94] has developed a great activity. He has written a large number of short sketches and more extended novels,[95] and his talent is still in the ascendant. All of his productions are characterized by the same melancholy dignity and even tenor. He is never in a hurry with his narration, and his characters are sketched with a firm hand and clearly outlined against the background of the story. He loves his subjects with a calm, dispassionate love, and he loves the meanest of his creations no less than his heroes. He likes to dwell with them and to inspect them from every coign of vantage. He fondly tells of their good qualities and suffers with them for their natural defects. And yet, though he loves them, he does not place a halo around them, he does not idealize them. The situations are developed in his stories naturally, independently of what he would like them to be.