While connected with the _Volksblatt_ he wrote a number of sketches and short stories. The first one to attract the attention of the critic in the _Voschod_ was his 'Child's Play,'[100] after which his new books never failed of bringing out favorable comments in that Russian periodical. He depicts scenes from his own childhood, or from that middle class into which his fortune, an inheritance of his wife, brought him. His impulsiveness keeps him from elaborating his sketches into long novels, such as Spektor and Dienesohn have produced. There is rarely a complicated plot in them, but the separate situations are painted with great clearness and in bold relief. One may forget the story, but one will never forget his characters. They have all of them their sharply defined individuality, their language, their circle of thought. We get acquainted with them through their actions rather than through the author's description, and we like them not for the parts they play in the story, but for their strong personalities, equally pronounced in their virtues as in their weaknesses. The men and women he describes we have met somewhere, and we shall again recognize should we meet them in actual life. The Russian critic, who is naturally in touch with his own literature, unconsciously thinks of this and that well-known character in the writings of Gogol and Ostrovski, when he speaks of Rabinowitsch's creations, and at times he actually gives them their Russian names. But Rabinowitsch does not imitate Gogol and Ostrovski, at least not purposely. He is himself possessed of a humor which is not dissimilar to that of the Russian authors, and the society which he describes is not unlike the one Gogol knew half a century ago, and Ostrovski found even at a later time among the merchant class of Moscow. He is a close observer, and knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to present to the reader only the essential characteristics, and not to burden the story with subjective discussions. Although Rabinowitsch may have started in the literary field with no other idea than the current one of elevating the lower classes, there is certainly nothing in his works to show that that has long remained his main object. He writes to entertain, and not to instruct. Moreover, he draws his subjects from a class of society with which the masses are not particularly well acquainted. With him the last spark of the didactic ideals of the Haskala has entirely vanished. He is above all else a litterateur who is addressing an audience with a decided taste for good literature. He is, therefore, more calculated to win the ears of the better classes than of the lowly of his race, to exercise a corrective influence on the manners of the middle class than to educate or console the masses.