This was a book I read back in the 1980s, though it might have been older than that. A young Jewish girl living in the city at the height of the Depression is obsessed by horses and tries to win one through a contest on the back of a cereal box. I believe the book ends with her actually winning the horse, but selling it in order to help bring a young orphaned boy out of Poland (WWII is has just started and Poland is occupied). There are lots of details about Jewish life: they live in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, so at sunset on the Sabbath all the kids stop playing and go indoors; they celebrate the heroine's bat mitzvah; Jewish identity is in general a very big theme at the heart of the story.
There are two incidental scenes I vividly remember. In the first, the heroine's older sister tries to bleach her long, beautiful black hair blonde and ends up turning it green with white streaks--a fact that gets revealed at the dinner table, on Sabbath, in front of company. In the second, the heroine decides to decorate her side of her bedroom with horse photos she's cut from magazines, and, as a joke, she also pastes pictures of horse butts on the wall above her sister's bed.
There are two incidental scenes I vividly remember. In the first, the heroine's older sister tries to bleach her long, beautiful black hair blonde and ends up turning it green with white streaks--a fact that gets revealed at the dinner table, on Sabbath, in front of company. In the second, the heroine decides to decorate her side of her bedroom with horse photos she's cut from magazines, and, as a joke, she also pastes pictures of horse butts on the wall above her sister's bed.