Arts Editor

Matthue Roth is concerned about society pigeonholing people into certain roles because of the way they look.

A chasidic Jew, the former Washington, D.C., resident says that "when I walk down the street with my beard, everyone assumes I think a certain way. I have always voted Democratic, but people who see me don't think that."

Similarly, Candy Cohen ‹ the protagonist of his new book, Candy in Action (Soft Skull Press, 2008) ‹ is "a girl who is trying to be a doctor and a caring best friend who gets shoved into the role of supermodel because of how she looks."

The book is an action novel, "but at its heart, it's about Candy trying to reconcile that society says if you look this way, you must act this way, as opposed to what she actually feels."

Roth, 30, grew up in Philadelphia and came to the Washington area to study anthropology and comparative religion at George Washington University. After he graduated, he stayed in the District as a consultant predicting sociological trends and attending services at Kesher Israel Congregation in the District.

In 2001, "I quit my job, moved to San Francisco and became a poet," he says. He started reciting "slam poetry" ("a cross between rapping and storytelling"), often focusing on the erotic. He was asked to be in the Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.

Looking at himself and the show's musicians, Roth, who moved to New York, says he suddenly realized that he and the others were "caricatures of themselves."

From that realization flowed his first novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, about an Orthodox teenage girl who is the only Jewish actor in a show about an Orthodox family.

He also has written Yom Kippur A Go-Go, a memoir.

Roth says he is always learning about the non-Orthodox world, inspired in part by Rabbi Barry Freundel of Kesher Israel, who taught him that "God created the whole world, and the whole world has a degree of holiness to it."

So, for example, he says he listens to both Jewish and non-Jewish music, finding "soul" in both.

Asked about the target audience for Candy in Action, he says the only audience he wrote it for was himself. However, the author says beginning with an encounter he had at Politics and Prose bookstore in the District a few years ago when a reader recognized him as the author of Never Mind the Goldbergs, he has received many communications from readers.

"It's wonderful that you write something, and three years later someone writes to you and says he really loved it."

Roth, who lives in the chasidic Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, N.Y., says many of his fellow zealously Orthodox Jews are fascinated with what he does.

"My rebbe says we all have different experiences in life, and the important part is to bring holiness into every situation," he says.