In Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy, Kafka explores assimilation into a dominant culture. In the short story, an ape who is captured in a West African jungle and brought to Europe realizes that in order to survive and maintain some degree of freedom, he must become human. The ape begins to immediately study how to imitate his human captors. Five years later, the ape is giving a report to a panel of scientists and explains how he transformed into a human. The former ape, Rotpeter, is so thoroughly assimilated into human society that he is unable to recall his life as an ape. This story, written in 1917, can be interpreted as a commentary on assimilation of immigrants into American life. Indeed, the short story appeared in a Jewish magazine and may have been speaking specifically about the assimilation of Jewish people into dominant American society. During the late nineteenth- and early-to-mid-twentieth-century waves of immigration into the US by non-Anglo people, xenophobia ran rampant and immigrants were often socially, verbally, and physically attacked for speaking their native languages or practicing their specific ethnic cultures and traditions. Families with non-English names would often change their last names to appear more "American" in order to assimilate with greater ease into American society. This assimilation came at a great cost to the culture, traditions, and language of the assimilating immigrant. In the story, while Rotpeter may be a successful artist in human society, he has lost his roots.