Sticking With The Kids

The Sticker Lady For sweetening the shul experience and bridging the generations.

The Sticker Lady For sweetening the shul experience and bridging the generations.

by Elicia Brown
Special To The Jewish Week

Marcia Talmage Schneider scans the room for potential clients. If she sees one, she beckons. She waves. She beams. Sometimes a customer can be shy. Sometimes a customer might climb onto her lap.
As on every other Saturday, Talmage Schneider has brought along her collection of Israeli stickers to Minyan Maat on the Upper West Side, where she doles them out to any child who asks. Known as “The Sticker Lady,” Talmage Schneider, a retired teacher, thrives on this bond with the community’s children.
“They are just like on cloud nine,” she says of the children’s response to the stickers, before she bursts into her customary, high-pitched giggle. “They grow a couple of inches sometimes.” Yes, Talmage Schneider admits, the activity can interrupt prayers, but “this is also davening in a different way.”
Talmage Schneider, who caters to an egalitarian, intellectual crew at Minyan Maat’s havurah, drew inspiration for her role from the traditional synagogue Candymen. Like these Candymen, who are typically men in their 50s and older, Talmage Schneider, who is 70, serves as a bridge across the generations, enlivening what can feel like a long Saturday morning in shul for children.
“She’s really there when you need her,” says Yardena Gerwin, 9.
Candymen, credited with sweetening services for decades, most commonly take up residence in Orthodox synagogues. They might store their lollipops in woolen tallis bags or draw Kit Kats from pockets. They might offer their products for just a smile, or at times, for an explanation of the parsha of the week. Like being a Sticker Lady, “Candyman” is not a paid position, nor one of great prestige, but he (or in a few instances, she) reaps other benefits.
Once word gets out that someone plies The Trade — that person can become as popular as an ice cream truck on a hot summer day. “Every kid knows me,” says Marty Ross, who is 60, and one of at least four Candymen at Young Israel of Scarsdale in Westchester. Ross seems to mentally lick his lips as he runs through his lollipop inventory: Tiger Pops, Blow Pops, Sour Pops and DumDums. “The children are too young to know what God is about, and they’re too young to know what davening is about, but they’re not too young to know what a community is,” he says.
“A shul without a Candyman is not a friendly shul,” proclaims David Sable, who runs the marketing company Wunderman, and who grew up among the Candymen “greats of all time” at Riverdale Jewish Center.
While the Candyman might be every child’s best friend, not every shul-goer lavishes the same high praise. Some grumble about the sticky seats or wrappers left behind. Some parents complain about sugar highs and dental bills. Mark Freilich, a pediatrician who dabbles in the Candyman business at Lincoln Square Synagogue, tries to address the health concerns. He now passes out fruit twists.
Talmage Schneider took it one step further. “I wouldn’t want my kid to get candy,” she says as she sifts through her wares on a recent morning at her Upper West Side apartment.
“Oh,” says Talmage Schneider, as if she’s presenting a particularly precious gemstone, “this is really very lovely.” She indicates a sticker bearing the phrase “Derech Eretz,” loosely translated as acting with kindness. She’s eager to show off her collection in its entirety — a page of autumn images, another with the colors labeled with their Hebrew names, a small white circle encasing a blue Jewish star.
Elliot Schwartz, another candyman at the Young Israel of Scarsdale, who is 56 and president of ArtScroll Publishers, boasts he is “never caught without a lollipop in my pocket, blue on the right side; pink on the left side,” notes that “every Candyman and lady has a story as to why they do it” — and so, in fact, does The Sticker Lady.
Talmage Schneider’s is told by her quilt-like tallis bag, crafted from the ritual objects of four important men: her grandfather, her father, her second husband Frank and her son Daniel.
Talmage Schneider first met Frank Talmage on a boat to Israel in 1958. The two spent that year as juniors abroad at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. They remained close during the 30 years that followed, as Talmage gained renown as a scholar of Judaic studies, and Talmage Schneider shifted from Jewish schools to public schools, while raising Daniel as a single mother. (She had divorced Daniel’s father after a brief, unhappy marriage.)
In 1988, Talmage proposed. It wasn’t at a moment of strength: He was suffering through the advanced stages of an autoimmune disease called scleraoderma. The marriage lasted two months — until his funeral.
Three years later, Daniel, an art student at SUNY-Buffalo, returned home at the end of his junior year. A few mornings later, he complained of a stomach ache so severe that he didn’t want to leave his bed. “I said, ‘You need to go to ER,’ but 21-year-old kids are invincible. At least they think they are.” When Talmage Schneider came back after work, her son’s lips were blue. “He was already dead.”
And so Talmage Schneider craves the company of children.
Purists question Talmage Schneider’s approach. “A Sticker Lady! That’s ridiculous. How can a kid eat a sticker? Kids deserve to be kids,” says Ross.
“Yeah, you know, that’s a nice thing, but it’s a little too politically correct for my taste,” says Sable. “Kids should be all blue on Shabbat and sticky. It adds a little bit of joyousness.”
While The Sticker Lady shtick may seem newfangled, the role of the Candyman doesn’t date back to ancient times either. Scholars haven’t written extensively about the topic, but the fact “that it has an English name rather than a Yiddish name suggests that it is probably an American invention” rooted in an older tradition of Eastern Europe, says Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. According to European Jewish custom, a new student’s slate at school would be dipped in honey to symbolize the sweetness of learning.
At Minyan Maat, it’s not just the stickers; it’s the lady. Talmage Schneider, they say, is the first to dance when a member announces his or her happy news to the congregation. And when she announced her own simcha, her engagement to her third and present husband, Fred Schneider four years ago, Minyan Maat itself burst into dance and song and applause.
“She’s the face of the minyan,” says Ruby Namdar, a writer, who has two children, ages 4 and 6. “Honestly it’s her,” he says. His children, he says, have many stickers at home, but still get excited by Talmage Schneider’s collection. “It’s all the energy and warmth. She is our village elder.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization