Tsarist autocracy
Anxious to learn more about the people of the crowded Lower East Side milieu in which he lived, Poole set about learning Yiddish, eavesdropping on conversations and jotting down fragments of the dialog he heard for future use in his imaginative writing. He met and made friends with Abraham Cahan, publisher of the Yiddish-language "Jewish Daily Forward" "(Der Forverts)" and gained an appreciation from the venerable revolutionary of the struggle being waged by oppressed Jews and others against the Tsarist autocracy in Russia.