Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(orig. US) to complain, to delay, to nag; thus kvetcher, complainer.

1935		C.V. Hamilton So You’re Writing a Play 47: [K]vetching or complaining, ‘No one does my work’.
1950		WELS Supp.
1960		(con. 1930s) R. Barber Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968) 306: The forty-odd paying customers [...] shuffled, grousing and kvetching, to the elevators.
1969		Harper’s Mag. Sept. 92: What is a Jewish mother for, except to kvetch a little?
1978		R. Price Ladies’ Man (1985) 65: I was whining and kvetching about having to fuck a milk bottle.
1989		G. Tate ‘The GOP Throws a Mammy-Jammy’ in Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992) 103: Atwater didn’t say this as crudely as the ever-invidious Ed Koch did when he kvetched to a Brooklyn congregation on Martin Luther King Day how he wished we could get ‘politics out of the civil rights movement’.
1996		H. Roth From Bondage 381: What do I do, kvetch? Gripe?
2002		‘Touré’ Portable Promised Land (ms.) 168: They [...] kvetched about their deteriorating physical conditions.
2005		M. Wax Born to Kvetch (2006) 33: Kvetching – complaining – is not only a pastime, not only a response to adverse or imperfect circumstance, but a way of life [...] that sees the world through cataract-colored glasses.
2016		New Yorker 11-18 July 🌐 They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.
2021		J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 78: They kvetched, moped, and moaned.