“A Report to an Academy” by Franz Kafka

In this darkly comic parable of Jewish assimilation, the story's narrator—a former ape who has become a sophisticated academic—speaks of his experience being forcibly transformed into a member of what he feels is brute society. Published in a Zionist journal and filled with subtle allusions, Kafka's tale captures both the pain and the absurdity of being "civilized" on someone else's terms. This unsettling portrait of identity and conformity in Prague of 1917 became prophetic two decades later.